Implementing a Document-based Requirements Traceability: A Case Study

Requirements traceability as being mandated by many standards governing the development of systems (e.g. IEEE/EIA 12207) is undoubtedly useful to software maintenance. To many organizations, it is viewed as a measure of system quality and is treated as an important component of their efforts towards achieving process improvement (CMM). However, not much elaboration on what types of information needed and how a strategy to achieve this is described in the development standards and guidelines. In this paper, we present our approach in implementing a requirements traceability derived from system documentation. It provides visibility into a system composing of different artifacts that include requirements, test cases, design and code. Our approach supports the top down and bottom up traceability in response to tracing for the ripple-effects. We developed a traceability tool, called Catia and applied it to a case study of system documentation and discussed the results.