WHITE PAPER

Traceability Best Practices

Five Ways Systems Engineers Can Control
Change and Improve Quality
What product made today isnt 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 in unmanaged 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 sufficeif all requirements

are equal, and if your team, project and scope are so small
that youre the only person who needs to know how the
system youre building is impacted.
But its likely that these tools harm more than they help.
Heres what that spreadsheet on your desktop cant do:
manage the complex web of traceability to understand
the relationships between requirements and the people
who are responsible for them

Jama Software, Inc

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 youre able to tackle complex
challenges and support engineering and business.

The Top Three Bottom-Line Benefits

of Traceability
1. Connect test cases to requirements. If you cant
do this, you cant be sure you havent overlooked
something critical. Anything you miss at any stage can,
and usually will, result in revisions that cost you time
and money.
2. Connect system requirements to business/
stakeholder requirements. Same as above: Miss
this connection and youll risk incurring unplanned
expenses that can ultimately affect the launch date,
stakeholders confidence and the bottom lineall three
if the changes affect hardware.
3. 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-level requirements to the higher-level
requirements. Make a mistake here, and youll likely
deal with delays as you scramble to put the pieces back
together and make late-stage changes.
In many industries, especially those tied to
regulatory compliance, traceability isnt just a best
practice, its 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.

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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 youre 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? Traceabilitybut if the path
of connections isnt 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
Grow Productivity
Control Scope Changes
Complete Test Coverage

Improve Quality
Increase Visibility
Reduce Development Costs
Accelerate Innovation

Terminology

Before we get into best practices, wed 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.

ensures that the evolving product 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
youre building the right product.

Coverage Report

A Coverage Report associates requirements with the work

products that satisfy them. Often its used to track tests
associated with the requirements 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 before making a change.

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.

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

Jama is instrumental in allowing us to

document requirements and define the
scope of our projects. Its 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

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The Five Best Practices for Simplifying Traceability

1

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

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 youre
building are related in some fashion, either directly or indirectly. Heres an example of a common process flow:

Stakeholder
Requirements/
Objectives
Whats the vision
for this product?

System
Requirements

System
Architecture

Whats the
story of what
users need?

How should it
work to fulfill
the needs?

Verifications
How will the
system be tested
to ensure it meets
the requirements?

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 itanalysts, architects, development, verification
and quality assurance among themand 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. Its one of the primary
reasons organizations need
intuitive traceability.
Specifically, tracing relationships
identifies the individuals and teams
affected by change and allows them
to discuss and make decisions
in context.
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Coverage Explorer

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.

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

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.

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.

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Heres 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.

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 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 its all stored in the
definitive system of record and action.
Heres an example of a
side-by-side comparison
of two versions, using an
automated process within
Jama. For efficiency gains,
the specific field that
changed is highlighted in
yellow, so you dont have to
spend time hunting around
the full requirements
specification document to
pinpoint and understand
precisely what changed.

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Real-Time Communication

How often have you been involved in a project where

change 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.

Consider Jama if you need to support

ideation and requirements workflow
Jamas 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

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 dont 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.

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Organize and Visualize Data As You Like It

The complexity of most systems engineering projects requires a far 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. Its a web-based platform to help teams solve requirements management challenges 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.

MPAR: Organize by Documenta simple,

more traditional approach

MPAR2: Organize by Function or Systema more

systems-oriented approach that reduces silos of work

Picture this: Traceable communication. Documented decisions and actions. All product and

systems info organized and contextualized from concept to launch. With Jama, its your reality.
Try Jama and see how we can help you solve your teams systems engineering challenges.

About Jama Software

Jama Software is the definitive system of record and action for product development. The
companys modern requirements and test management solution helps enterprises accelerate
development time, mitigate risk, slash complexity and verify regulatory compliance. More than
650 product-centric organizations, including NASA, Rockwell Collins, Boeing and Caterpillar
use Jama to modernize their process for bringing complex products to market. The company
is headquartered in Portland, Oregon. For more information, visit www.jamasoftware.com.

Jama Software, Inc

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