As products get smarter, building them right becomesa matter of managing complexity. Products have morerequirements and companies have globally distributedteams and more products in their portfolios.
But when a single new product, version or variant hasthousands of requirements and interdependencies, the
process of dening, engineering and managing them growsexponentially more complicated. Traceability becomesmore challenging.
Gartner highlights one of the main reasons companiesstruggle to achieve the benets of traceability:
“The most widely adopted tools for requirementscontinue to be general document software such as
Microsoft Oce or Google Docs (40% to 50% of themarket) due to cost, availability and familiarity. Yetthese often lead to poorly managed requirements, thuseliminating and exceeding any cost benet the toolsthemselves have. Requirements end up captured in avariety of documents and spreadsheets supplementedby post-it notes in unmanaged versions with notraceability or reuse. This creates a more costly useracceptance testing cycle, both in the time to execute aswell as remediation of issues found late in the process,where they are far more costly to address.”
— Gartner Market Guide for Software Requirements
Defnition and Management Solutions 2014
Document-centric tools might suce—if all requirements
are equal, and if your team, project and scope are so smallthat you’re the only person who needs to know how thesystem you’re building is impacted.
But it’s likely that these tools harm more than they help.Here’s what that spreadsheet on your desktop can’t do:
• manage the complex web of traceability to understandthe relationships between requirements and the people
who are responsible for them
• quickly nd who and what are impacted by changes tothe system
• ensure that each requirement is validated and veried,that the completed product delivers what was asked forand that the system has been thoroughly tested
The tool you choose and how you use it inuences howeciently and eectively you’re able to tackle complexchallenges and support engineering and business.
The Top Three Bottom-Line Benefitsof Traceability
1. Connect test cases to requirements. If you can’tdo this, you can’t be sure you haven’t overlookedsomething critical. Anything you miss at any stage can,and usually will, result in revisions that cost you timeand money.
2. Connect system requirements to business/stakeholder requirements. Same as above: Missthis connection and you’ll risk incurring unplannedexpenses that can ultimately aect the launch date,stakeholders’ condence and the bottom line—all threeif the changes aect hardware.
3. Improve decomposition. To make sure thatcomponents and sub-components all come togetherto make a useful, functional system, you need torelate the lower-level requirements to the higher-levelrequirements. Make a mistake here, and you’ll likely
deal with delays as you scramble to put the pieces backtogether and make late-stage changes.
In many industries, especially those tied toregulatory compliance, traceability isn’t just a bestpractice, it’s a mandate. This paper outlines fve
ways Jama, a modern requirements managementand validation and verifcation solution, helpssystems engineers take control of traceability tokeep engineering and business aligned.
Traceability Best PracticesFive Ways Systems Engineers Can Control
“Jama is instrumental in allowing us todocument requirements and define thescope of our projects. It’s allowed us to
formally document our applications fromchange requests to formal functional/
performance requirements and ensuretraceability of requirements.”
- Jonathan Kobaly,CDG-Inmedius, a Boeing Company
ensures that the evolving product remains on track to meetproduct goals and customer needs. Upstream relationshipshelp to avoid scope creep.
DownstreamDownstream relationships, aka “forward traceability,”looks at the links between detailed functionalrequirements, test cases, tasks, defects and other itemsthat support it. Downstream relationships ensure that
you’re building the right product.
Coverage Report A Coverage Report associates requirements with the workproducts that satisfy them. Often it’s used to track testsassociated with the requirements on which they are basedand the product tested to meet the requirement.
Impact AnalysisUsing Impact Analysis, you can capture the traceabilitylinks between requirements, specications, design andtests. You can analyze relationships to determine the scopeof an initiating change.
Version History Used for change control, a detailed history of eachrequirement and other items is documented and storedin a unied system of record, enabling complete audittrails used over the life cycle of the requirement. Versionhistories are required for industry compliance in specicindustries.
Suspect LinksSuspect Links help manage the impact of requirementchanges. A trace relationship (or link) becomes suspectafter an upstream requirement in the relationship changes
A Suspect Links report is often used along with Impact Analysis for assessing impact before making a change.
ISO 9001ISO 9001 concerns the management of the requirementsthat your systems’ standards must satisfy. According tothe International Organization for Standardization, thisstandard “helps ensure that customers get consistent, goodquality products and services, which in turn brings many
business benets.”
ChallengesDo any of these scenarios sound familiar? You justreceived feedback from your best customer mid-project,and a high-level business requirement needs to change.How will this change impact the system specication yourengineers are working on right now? How will it impactscope for the upcoming release?
Your QA team just found a show-stopping bug in your
most popular new feature and you’re two weeks awayfrom launch. Do you ship with the known bug or delay thelaunch? Who is working on that feature? Who else needs to
be notied and weigh in on the decision? What else doesit aect?
These scenarios occur daily for engineering teams. So,how do you deal with them? Traceability—but if the pathof connections isn’t easy to create and follow, it adds to
your problems.
The Advantages of Intuitive Traceability Traceability should never, ever add complexity. Jama
makes it easy to perform and report on traces so that you stay on time, on budget and within scope.
For most organizations, the benets outweigh thetime required to set up traceability by at least 2x.
With a consistent process, structured templates and amodern requirements management tool, you benetfrom an automated and streamlined process:
• Minimize Risk
• Grow Productivity
• Control Scope Changes
• Complete Test Coverage
• Improve Quality
• Increase Visibility
• Reduce Development Costs
• Accelerate Innovation
Terminology Before we get into best practices, we’d like to clarify some
basic denitions. Systems engineers know these well, but we want to make sure you understand our references.
Traceability As dened by INCOSE (International Council of SystemsEngineering): “Traceability documents how the formalrequirements are intended to meet the stakeholderobjectives and achieve stakeholder agreement.”
Trace RelationshipTrace relationships are the links between items withinthe scope of a project, used to help assess impact on otheritems when a change occurs.
UpstreamUpstream relationships, aka “backward traceability,” looksat the links between detailed functional requirements
back up to the original customer need and high-levelrequirements captured. Using upstream relationships
Trace relationships to connect artifacts together to map out interdependencies between the dierent items. Theserelationships are the foundation for eective traceability. Below is an example of traceability showing both upstream anddownstream trace relationships.
Traceable relationships are as much about connecting the people involved as they are about connecting all items. Eachrequirement in the system has members of your team associated with it—analysts, architects, development, vericationand quality assurance among them—and stakeholders and customers who care about its status.
When one item changes, it has aripple eect on other related itemsand the people associated with theitems. Keeping track of this ripple
eect is crucial to the success of your projects. It’s one of the primaryreasons organizations needintuitive traceability.
Specically, tracing relationshipsidenties the individuals and teamsaected by change and allows themto discuss and make decisionsin context.
Trace Relationships
As in many aspects of life, your product and system development success is highly dependent on relationships. All details
such as user requirements, functional requirements, test cases and other items that dene the scope of what you’re building are related in some fashion, either directly or indirectly. Here’s an example of a common process ow:
The Five Best Practices for Simplifying TraceabilityTrace relationships to represent systematic decomposition and test coverage
Ensure traceability reporting and proper coverage using Coverage Explorer
Assess the impact of change before it occurs with Impact Analysis
Document changes for complete visibility and a detailed audit trail with Version History
Stay synced with Stream communication. By referencing people and items through
@mentions, you can easily track comments through filters and history
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StakeholderRequirements/
Objectives
What’s the visionfor this product?
System Architecture
How should itwork to fulfillthe needs?
Verifications
How will thesystem be testedto ensure it meetsthe requirements?
Traceability reporting through Jama Coverage Explorer visuallyrepresents the coverage of your product and system, helping you alignusers, maintain quality, meet compliance regulations and understandthe impact of change.
Users can view related items and understand the status of those items.
For example, users can verify that their requirements have downstreamtest cases and see what percentage of those test cases have passed.
In the simple example below, a list of requirements are shownalong with their state in the rst column. In the second column, thedownstream verication tests are listed for each requirement. Fromthis view, teams can see what verication coverage they have, where
verication tests are missing and get high-level verication results.
Every test case has a comment and activity stream accessible to allusers. Testers and contributors can capture decisions, answer questionsand resolve issues transparently and responsively.
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“Reviews are tremendously valuable in Jama. Likewise, theuser interface is very intuitive for90 percent of the features thatusers must quickly access. Theseare among the top reasons why
we selected Jama as the officialShure RM Tool. The excellentcustomer support that we getmakes the Jama team (business,sales and technical staff) feel likean extension of our Shure staff.”
- Tony BranchProduct Platform Planning
Staff Systems EngineerShure Incorporated
Impact Analysis
What if you could anticipate the impact of a change on your project and the entire team before it occurred? Will thischange request send the development team over the edge? What if you could predict the whether? These insightsare possible with Impact Analysis. Impact Analysis relies on the trace relationships you set up, and it reports on thecomplete picture of all the items that are directly and indirectly aected.
Capturing a complete and detailed record of all changes is a critical element for reaching higher levels of requirementsmaturity within your process, such as ISO 9001.
Version History is for those among us who like to (or have to) roll up our sleeves and get deep into the details of everychange. It also helps companies meet regulatory compliance standards in elds such as aerospace and medical devices.
One of the benets of traceability is having a comprehensive audit trail of changes, so you can analyze the who, what, whenand why of every change made. At the same time, you can easily roll back to an earlier version because it’s all stored in thedenitive system of record and action.
Here’s an example of aside-by-side comparisonof two versions, using anautomated process within
Jama. For eciency gains,the specic eld thatchanged is highlighted in
yellow, so you don’t have tospend time hunting aroundthe full requirementsspecication document topinpoint and understandprecisely what changed.
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Here’s an example of an automated impact analysis report for a high-level business requirement. If this requirementchanges, three directly related system requirements, downstream software requirements and numerous verication tests
How often have you been involved in a project where“change notice paralysis” sets in after a couple of weeks ofinbox overload? Usually it occurs when the entire team ison a project-wide distribution list, and the project manageris on the hook to send out an email with the complete200-page software requirements specication document
attached for every time a minor change occurs. Rightintention, wrong solution.
What happens next? People either waste time huntingaround in the document trying to determine if the latestchange is relevant to them, or, they tune out the email“noise” and miss an important change, which is evenmore costly.
There are smarter ways to keep everyone on thesame page.
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“Consider Jama if you need to supportideation and requirements workflow…Jama’s product drives traceability fromrequirements to validation, with supportfor planning and management of tests. Thefocus of the vendor has been on ease of use
and collaboration, and a key capability isthe Jama Review Center functionality. Jamaoffers a strong solution in requirementsmanagement, including traceability totest management and product delivery.”
- Gartner, Magic Quadrant for ApplicationDevelopment Life Cycle Management, 2015
You need to be sure that everyone impacted by a change is in the loop. At the same time, you don’t want to ood the entireorganization with irrelevant emails. What do you do?
In the example above using Jama, you can instantly send a direct link to the specic requirement that changed, with versionnotes, to only the relevant groups or individual users aected. Notication is part of the overall change management
systems-oriented approach that reduces silos of work
Organize and Visualize Data As You Like It
The complexity of most systems engineering projects requires a far more powerful, elegant and modern solution thaninadequate and inexible manual and legacy tools.
Jama was designed and built to be an intuitive user experience for engineering and business collaboration andcommunication. It’s a web-based platform to help teams solve requirements management challenges and automatetraceability. In the process, you save time and money, accelerate development cycles, reduce the risk of error and improvequality and compliance.
Jama improves how you deal with data. The ability to organize and visualize data is one of the key dierentiators forsystems engineering, as shown in the example below.
MPAR: Organize by Document—a simple,
more traditional approach
About Jama SoftwareJama Software is the definitive system of record and action for product development. Thecompany’s modern requirements and test management solution helps enterprises acceleratedevelopment time, mitigate risk, slash complexity and verify regulatory compliance. More than650 product-centric organizations, including NASA, Rockwell Collins, Boeing and Caterpillaruse Jama to modernize their process for bringing complex products to market. The companyis headquartered in Portland, Oregon. For more information, visit www.jamasoftware.com.
Picture this: Traceable communication. Documented decisions and actions. All product andsystems info organized and contextualized from concept to launch. With Jama, it’s your reality.Try Jama and see how we can help you solve your team’s systems engineering challenges.
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