Managing Traceability in Data Warehouse Development Projects

Traceability is the ability to verify the history, location, or application of an entity by means of a documented record. It is considered to be one of the vital quality attribute of data warehouses and is of great interest to developers. Although traceability is a key success factor of data warehouse development projects but lack of a proper methodology has impeded the application of traceability techniques in practice. From a long time, traceability had been ignored as an area of research. This is because many developers used to think that it is not an important quality factor and practicing traceability would simply involve cost, time, money and other resources. However, a data warehouse is of little use to its users if the entire history or details of a particular entity is not recorded properly. The paper therefore presents an overview of data warehouse followed by key terms and definitions of important aspects of traceability. The paper also brings forth the scheme of implementing traceability in data warehouse projects and the workflow of activities that must be performed while applying traceability practices. Last but not the least, the paper discusses certain benefits, limiting factors of implementing traceability as well as the approaches which when adopted can help the data warehouse developers to overcome the hurdles in practicing traceability. As a final note the paper puts light on future challenges where much more research needs to be done.