Requirements Tracing, Tracking and Reporting - Requirements Engineering and Management for Software Development Projects - page 125

Chapter 9
Requirements Tracing, Tracking
and Reporting

9.1 Introduction

The most common cause of software product failure or dissatisfaction of end users
with the delivered product is missing requirements or badly implemented
requirements. Some of the requirements are forgotten, or changed, or deleted or
poorly implemented especially in made-to-order software development projects.
So, we need to trace, track and report the transition of requirements into a software
product all through the software development life cycle. This chapter discusses
these topics.

9.2 Requirements Traceability

Requirements tracing involves identifying the requirement in all the software
artifacts including information artifacts and code artifacts.
Wikipedia defines traceability as ''the ability to chronologically interrelate the
uniquely identifiable entities in a way that matters''.
IEEE standard 610—IEEE Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Ter-
minology defines traceability thus: ''The degree to which a relationship can be
established between two and more products of the development process, especially
products having a predecessor-successor or master-subordinate relationship to one
another; for example, the degree to which the requirements and design of a given
software component match'' and also as ''The degree to which each element in a
software development product establishes its reason for existing; for example, the
degree to which each element in a bubble chart references the requirement that it
satisfies.''
CMMI model document for development version 1.3 defines traceability as ''A
discernible

association between requirements and related requirements,