Requirements Tracing, Tracking and Reporting - Requirements Engineering and Management for Software Development Projects - page 131

implementing the requirement, does tracing ensure it? How well is the requirement
implemented?
Tracking requirements ensures that the requirement is implemented compre-
hensively both in letter and in spirit.
Tracking requirements requires diligence from project management team. It is
not achieved by looking at the traceability matrix to ensure that every requirement
is implemented. We need to go deeper that.
Tracking requirements and ensuring that they are comprehensively imple-
mented belongs to quality assurance activities. In Chap. 6 we discussed the ver-
ification and validation of requirements. We also discussed the ''how'' of those two
techniques. We included a bullet in Sect. 6.3.1 , on Peer Reviews, which states
''Ensure that the technical content is comprehensive.'' It is aimed at achieving this
objective to ensure that the requirements are comprehensively implemented.
Validation ensures that the implementation is indeed working and is defect free.
Verification and validation together ensure that the implementation of the
requirements is comprehensive to the extent they are implemented in the software
artifacts. The traceability matrix ensures that all requirements are implemented.
Quality assurance goes beyond the verification and validation techniques.
Quality assurance includes the quality control activities (namely the verification and
validation) as well as activities aimed at preventing defects and ensuring that the
work is carried out comprehensively. These are discussed in Sect. 6.2 , on ''Quality
Assurance in the context of Requirements Engineering and Management.'' Just to
recap, the activities include defining and continuously improving an organizational
process for carrying out various activities, staffing with the right resources well
trained in their craft, diligent quality control, measurement and analysis of results,
and project postmortem. The process includes procedures, standards, guidelines,
checklists, formats and templates. All these play a vital role in ensuring that the
requirements are comprehensively implemented throughout the software develop-
ment life cycle. Quality control ensures that the implementation is right and is free
from defects. Even the traceability matrix discussed in this chapter is also a format
included in the organizational process assets from the formats and templates section.
Thus:

1. Tracing requirements using the traceability matrix ensures that all requirements
are implemented.
2. The organizational process and diligent quality control ensures that all

requirements are comprehensively implemented.

9.7 Requirements Reporting

It is one thing to carry out work conforming to a defined organizational process
and it is yet another thing to ensure that work is carried out diligently, compre-
hensively

and delivers results without defects. The difficulty increases