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Got Traceability?
Dr. Andrew Makar is an IT program manager and is the author of the Microsoft Project Made Easy series. For more project management advice, visit the website TacticalProjectManagement.com.
How do you ensure the business requirements defined at the start of the project are successfully transformed into the IT solution?
As a project manager, we spend considerable effort tracking project issues, risks and project schedules. How often do we track business requirements to ensure the requirements are correctly developed? Without requirements traceability, projects run the risk of assuming business requirements will be translated into a solution once the initial business requirement specification or use case is defined.
According to Carnegie Melon’s Software Engineering Institute, requirements traceability is “the ability to describe and follow the life of a requirement, in both a forward and backward direction”. Traceability indicates the requirement can be tracked from its origins, specification, development, deployment and use as the project executes across the project lifecycle. Cross-referencing and document-integration templates are two techniques to apply traceability.
A requirements traceability matrix is one tool that supports the integration technique for traceability. The tool is simply a set of columns that track business requirements as that are developed into system requirements, code packages and test cases. When a requirement is identified, it is assigned an identification number and stored in a requirement …
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