Traceability between artifacts in the development lifecycle
is important for governance and impact analysis: it facilitates the
overall quality of the software or systems application being developed,
and enables teams to make informed changes, reduce risk, and improve
agility.
By creating traceable relationships between software artifacts
across all disciplines, including design management, requirements
management, change and configuration management, and quality management,
you can improve quality in the following ways:
- Share and combine information about projects so that project teams
and stakeholders are better able to understand the application being
developed.
- Assess and manage the impact of change on elements in the design
by performing impact analysis.
- Identify and eliminate gaps to ensure full coverage across requirements,
design, development, and test.
- Ensure that the design satisfies the business requirements.
- View related artifacts and make informed decisions about the project.
Lifecycle views
Links between artifacts
help increase the quality of a software solution. You can view the
relationships between artifacts, and identify and eliminate missing
information by using the following Traceability views:
- Traceability in Rational® Team Concert:
When you create plans and link them to other artifacts, the Traceability
view visualizes the relationships for each plan item. To include information
about links to design artifacts you can modify the Traceability view
to include columns for specific link types. For example, the default
columns do not include the Elaborates Architecture Element link type,
so you must add one.
- Traceability in Rational Requirements Composer:
When you link design artifacts to requirements, you can view the traceability
links in query results or in dashboard widgets. For more information,
see Traceability.
Lifecycle queries
You can use queries to
answer traceability questions. You can use traceability queries and
filters to find gaps and assess quality. There are several predefined
queries that you can use to view traceability:
- In Rational Software Architect,
on the Designs menu, click , and select a query from the list.
- In a Rational solution for Collaborative
Lifecycle Management application,
on the Work Items menu, click , expand Lifecycle Queries and
select a query from the list.