Traceability Best Practices - Jama Software

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jamasoftware.com

What product made today isn’t a system?

As products get smarter, building them right becomes a matter of

managing complexity. Products have more requirements and

companies have globally distributed teams and more products in

their portfolios.

But when a single new product, version or variant has thousands of

requirements and interdependencies, the process of defining,

engineering and managing them grows exponentially more

complicated. Traceability becomes more challenging.

Gartner highlights one of the main reasons companies struggle to

achieve the benefits of traceability:

“The most widely adopted tools for requirements continue to be

general document software such as Microsoft Office or Google

Docs (40% to 50% of the market) due to cost, availability and

familiarity. Yet these often lead to poorly managed requirements,

thus eliminating and exceeding any cost benefit the tools

themselves have. Requirements end up captured in a variety of

documents and spreadsheets supplemented by post-it notes inunmanaged versions with no traceability or reuse. This creates a

more costly user acceptance testing cycle, both in the time to

execute as well as remediation of issues found late in the process,

where they are far more costly to address.”Gartner Market Guide

for Software Requirements Definition and Management

Solutions 2014

Document-centric tools might suffice—if all requirements are equal,

and if your team, project and scope are so small that you’re the only

person who needs to know how the system you’re building is

ceability Best Practices - Jama Software about:reader?url=http://www.jamasoftware.com/resource/traceability-b...

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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 understand therelationships between requirements and the people who are

responsible for them

quickly find who and what are impacted by changes to the

system

ensure that each requirement is validated and verified, that the

completed product delivers what was asked for and that the

system has been thoroughly tested

The tool you choose and how you use it influences how efficiently

and effectively you’re able to tackle complex challenges and support

engineering and business.

The Top Three Bottom-Line Benefits of Traceability

Connect test cases to requirements. If you can’t do this,

you can’t be sure you haven’t overlooked something critical.

Anything you miss at any stage can, and usually will, result in

revisions that cost you time and money.

1.

Connect system requirements to business/stakeholder

requirements. Same as above: Miss this connection and

you’ll risk incurring unplanned expenses that can ultimately

affect the launch date, stakeholders’ confidence and the bottom

line—all three if the changes affect hardware.

2.

Improve decomposition. To make sure that components

and sub-components all come together to make a useful,

functional system, you need to relate the lower-levelrequirements to the higher-level requirements. Make a mistake

here, and you’ll likely deal with delays as you scramble to put

the pieces back together and make late-stage changes.

3.


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In many industries, especially those tied to regulatory

compliance, traceability isn’t just a best practice, it’s a

mandate. This paper outlines five ways Jama, a modern

requirements management and validation and

verification solution, helps systems engineers take control

of traceability to keep engineering and business aligned.

Challenges

Do any of these scenarios sound familiar? You just received

feedback from your best customer mid-project, and a high-level

business requirement needs to change. How will this change impact

the system specification your engineers are working on right now?

How will it impact scope for the upcoming release?

Your QA team just found a show-stopping bug in your most popular

new feature and you’re two weeks away from launch. Do you ship

with the known bug or delay the launch? Who is working on that

feature? Who else needs to be notified and weigh in on the

decision? What else does

it affect?

These scenarios occur daily for engineering teams. So,

how do you deal with them? Traceability—but if the path

of 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 benefits outweigh the time required to

set up traceability by at least 2x. With a consistent process,

structured templates and a modern requirements management tool,

you benefit from an automated and streamlined process:

Minimize Risk


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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

definitions. Systems engineers know these well, but we want to

make sure you understand our references.

Traceability

As defined by INCOSE (International Council of Systems

Engineering): “Traceability documents how the formal

requirements are intended to meet the stakeholder objectives and

achieve stakeholder agreement.”

Trace Relationship

Trace relationships are the links between items within the scope of

a project, used to help assess impact on other items when a change

occurs.

Upstream

Upstream relationships, aka “backward traceability,” looks at the

links between detailed functional requirements back up to the

original customer need and high-level requirements captured.

Using upstream relationships ensures that the evolving product


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remains on track to meet product goals and customer needs.

Upstream relationships help to avoid scope creep.

Downstream

Downstream relationships, aka “forward traceability,” looks at the

links between detailed functional requirements, test cases, tasks,

defects and other items that support it. Downstream relationships

ensure that you’re building the right product.

Coverage Report

A Coverage Report associates requirements with the work products

that satisfy them. Often it’s used to track tests associated with therequirements on which they are based and the product tested to

meet the requirement.

Impact Analysis

Using Impact Analysis, you can capture the traceability links

between requirements, specifications, design and tests. You can

analyze relationships to determine the scope of an initiating change.

Version History

Used for change control, a detailed history of each requirement and

other items is documented and stored in a unified system of record,

enabling complete audit trails used over the life cycle of the

requirement. Version histories are required for industry compliance

in specific industries.

Suspect Links

Suspect Links help manage the impact of requirement changes. A

trace relationship (or link) becomes suspect after an upstream

requirement in the relationship changes. A Suspect Links report is

often used along with Impact Analysis for assessing impact beforemaking a change.


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ISO 9001

ISO 9001 concerns the management of the requirements that your

systems’ standards must satisfy. According to the International

Organization for Standardization, this standard “helps ensure that

customers get consistent, good quality products and services, which

in turn brings many business benefits.”

“Jama is instrumental in allowing us to document requirements

and define the scope of our projects. It’s allowed us to formally

document our applications from change requests to formal

functional/performance requirements and ensure traceability of

requirements.” Jonathan Kobaly,

CDG-Inmedius, a Boeing Company

The Five Best Practices for Simplifying Traceability

Trace 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

1. 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 define the scope of what you’re building are related in


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some fashion, either directly or indirectly. Here’s an example of a

common process flow:

Trace relationships to connect artifacts together to map out

interdependencies between the different items. These relationships

are the foundation for effective traceability. Below is an example of

traceability showing both upstream and downstream trace

relationships.

Traceable relationships are as much about connecting the people

involved as they are about connecting all items. Each requirement

in the system has members of your team associated with

it—analysts, architects, development, verification and quality

assurance among them—and stakeholders and customers who care

about its status.

When one item changes, it has a ripple effect on other related items

and the people associated with the items. Keeping track of this

ripple effect is crucial to the success of your projects. It’s one of the

primary reasons organizations need

intuitive traceability.

Specifically, tracing relationships identifies the individuals and


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teams affected by change and allows them to discuss and make

decisions in context.

2. Coverage Explorer

“Reviews are tremendously valuable in Jama. Likewise, the user

interface is very intuitive for 90 percent of the features that users

must quickly access. These are among the top reasons why we

selected Jama as the official Shure RM Tool. The excellent

customer support that we get makes the Jama team (business,

sales and technical staff) feel like an extension of our Shure

staff.”Tony Branch,

Product Platform Planning Staff Systems Engineer, Shure

Incorporated

Traceability reporting through Jama Coverage Explorer visually

represents the coverage of your product and system, helping you

align users, maintain quality, meet compliance regulations and

understand the impact of change.

Users can view related items and understand the status of those

items. For example, users can verify that their requirements have

downstream test cases and see what percentage of those test cases

have passed.

In the simple example below, a list of requirements are shown along

with their state in the first column. In the second column, the

downstream verification tests are listed for each requirement. From

this view, teams can see what verification coverage they have, where verification tests are missing and get high-level verification results.

Every test case has a comment and activity stream accessible to all

users. Testers and contributors can capture decisions, answer

questions and resolve issues transparently and responsively.


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3. Impact Analysis

What if you could anticipate the impact of a change on your project

and the entire team before it occurred? Will this change request

send the development team over the edge? What if you could

predict the whether? These insights are possible with Impact

Analysis. Impact Analysis relies on the trace relationships you set

up, and it reports on the complete picture of all the items that are

directly and indirectly affected.

Here’s an example of an automated impact analysis report for a

high-level business requirement. If this requirement changes, three

directly related system requirements, downstream software

requirements and numerous verification tests would all be affected.

4. Version History

Capturing a complete and detailed record of all changes is a critical

element for reaching higher levels of requirements maturity within

your process, such as ISO 9001.

Version History is for those among us who like to (or have to) roll


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up our sleeves and get deep into the details of every change. It also

helps companies meet regulatory compliance standards in fields

such as aerospace and medical devices.

One of the benefits of traceability is having a comprehensive audit

trail of changes, so you can analyze the who, what, when and why of

every change made. At the same time, you can easily roll back to an

earlier version because it’s all stored in the definitive system of

record and action.

Here’s an example of a side-by-side comparison of two versions,

using an automated process within Jama. For efficiency gains, thespecific field that changed is highlighted in yellow, so you don’t

have to spend time hunting around the full requirements

specification document to pinpoint and understand precisely what

changed.

5. Real-Time Communication

“Consider Jama if you need to support ideation and requirements workflow… Jama’s product drives traceability from requirements

to validation, with support for planning and management of

tests. The focus of the vendor has been on ease of use and

collaboration, and a key capability is the Jama Review Center

functionality. Jama offers a strong solution in requirements

management, including traceability to test management and

product delivery.”Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Application

Development Life Cycle Management, 2015

How often have you been involved in a project where “change


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notice paralysis” sets in after a couple of weeks of inbox overload?

Usually it occurs when the entire team is on a project-wide

distribution list, and the project manager is on the hook to send out

an email with the complete 200-page software requirements

specification document attached for every time a minor change

occurs. Right intention, wrong solution.

What happens next? People either waste time hunting around in

the document trying to determine if the latest change is relevant to

them, or, they tune out the email “noise” and miss an important

change, which is even more costly.

There are smarter ways to keep everyone on the same page.

You need to be sure that everyone impacted by a change is in the

loop. At the same time, you don’t want to flood the entire

organization with irrelevant emails. What do you do?

In the example above using Jama, you can instantly send a direct

link to the specific requirement that changed, with version notes, to

only the relevant groups or individual users affected. Notification is

part of the overall change management workflow. Stay in the loop.

Avoid noise.

Organize and Visualize Data As You Like It

The complexity of most systems engineering projects requires a far


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more powerful, elegant and modern solution than inadequate and

inflexible manual and legacy tools.

Jama was designed and built to be an intuitive user experience for

engineering and business collaboration and communication. It’s a

web-based platform to help teams solve requirements managementchallenges and automate traceability. In the process, you save time

and money, accelerate development cycles, reduce the risk of error

and improve quality and compliance.

Jama improves how you deal with data. The ability to organize and

visualize data is one of the key differentiators for systems

engineering, as shown in the example below.

Picture this: Traceable communication. Documented decisions

and actions. All product and systems 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 systemsengineering challenges.


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