Requirement Traceability Matrix Aids Distributed Software Development

By Author: Martin Lobo
Total Articles: 355
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The growth of technology has had a direct impact on the global expansion of large number of enterprises. Technological innovations have paved way for organizations to be techno savvy and meet up to the expectations of the customer and their ever changing demands. However, in an attempt to meet the requirements of the customers, enterprises are faced by challenges of upgrading their IT infrastructure and the various software applications.

The development of software applications depends largely on the understanding of the requirements of the customers and their demands. The software development life cycle is made of of various phases and includes requirement analysis, specification, design, coding, testing, integration, deployment, and maintenance. Though each phase of the software development life cycle is important, requirement analysis is critical to the success of a software project.

Further, most of the new age enterprises depend on globally distributed teams to work on a single project. As collaboration between teams becomes a necessity this calls for the need for an effective requirements requirements traceability matrix ...
... which will facilitate the development teams to understand the phase –wise requirements of the software development lifecycle. Leading service providers have worked out requirements management solutions which would provide the enterprises with a rich global platform for requirement collection, collaboration and tracing of implementation.

Requirements traceability is the ability to describe and trace the life of a requirement, from its source, through development, specification and actual deployment, till the refinement and iteration of any phases of the product cycle. This can be achieved either through cross referencing, forming of special templates and integration of transformation documents or restructuring. The software development teams gather the details of the requirements from stakeholders beneficiaries and vendors and they and streamlines these with the help of the requirement traceability matrix.

The requirements traceability matrix being a bidirectional one tracks both forward and backward requirements in a software development life cycle. The forward tracking facilitates to understand the output whereas the backward tracking helps enterprises to find out the customized business requirement. The traceability matrix thus created maps relationship between any user requirements and test cases and is represented in the form of a table with identifier for each of the items of one document in the left column and the identifiers for the other document across the top row. The higher the value the more complex is the relationship and needs to be simplified.

Irrespective of the enterprises using waterfall methodology or agile methodology in a distributed software development environment, the requirements traceability matrix helps the project teams to ensure that the project requirements are achieved and tracks every change made to the requirement.

Read more about- agile methodology, application lifecycle management