Documenting Requirements Traceability Information: A Case Study

The literature lists many benefits of requirements traceability and standards suggest that it should be practiced. However, available literature concentrates on industries developing complex and large systems with several thousands of requirements. Thus, the companies developing systems with only approximately a hundred requirements face the challenge to define what traceability information to document and how. The goals of this thesis were to introduce requirements traceability and to offer guidelines for documenting traceability information for these companies. The thesis is part of the QURE (Quality Through Requirement) project at Helsinki University of Technology. The thesis begins with an introduction of traceability classes, relations and benefits of documenting them. It also presents techniques and tools to document traceability information. The theory part ends with discussion of the costs and problems of practicing requirements traceability. The case study part of the thesis consists of an analysis of requirements traceability and good practices developed for documenting traceability information in a case company. In addition, improvement actions that were taken by the company are presented. The thesis ends with a discussion of the theoretical implications of the work, the most important of which is the observation that pre-traceability is the first that the target group companies could document and benefit from whereas there can be many problems in documenting post-traceability information.