Requirements Traceability

Requirements tracing is inevitable. We do tracing when we search information and it is difficult to imagine a software development environment without some tracing aids. For medium to complex systems we should have a traceability model and traceability aids should be in place. In these systems we have a quite complex web of relationships. It is common to have several requirements coming from the same source as well as a single requirement having more than one source. It is also common to have one requirement deriving several others as well as several requirements collapsing into a single one. The diversity and huge amount of information dealt with when developing large software systems point to the need for automated support to development practices, including traceability. This chapter presents the concept of requirements tracing and discusses several aspects related to traceability. Particular importance is given to the informal aspects of requirements tracing and to the non-functional nature of requirements traceability.