How you trace requirements impacts the quality and the delivery of the product.
Did you know that the average $3 million project costs companies using poor requirements practices an average of $5.87 million per project — a $2.24 million premium?
According to BABOK: “Traceability is the ability to look at a requirement and others to which it is related, linking business requirements to stakeholder and solution requirements, to artifacts and to solution components.”
Requirements are a way to document the needs of the business in an organized fashion. Tracing a requirements back to it’s lineage has the following advantages:
- Potential reduction in project costs
- Easier way to identify and track changes
- It complies with the industry standard.
There may be reasons as to why people would want to avoid tracing requirements. A typical reason is it takes a lot of time. Another one is it does not add value.
Traceability is a link from the user, stakeholder to the actual product features and going backwards from the product features back to the stakeholder, user.
