You hear a lot about “traceability’ in context to requirements management. It’s one of the primary benefits and reasons for buying a requirements management solution.

As the products we’re all building become more sophisticated as stand-alone software applications or embedded software within physical products, it’s common for development projects to consist of hundreds or thousands of requirements and other related items.

So, how do you keep track of everything when changes occur? That’s where traceability comes in.

Traceability helps you create relationships between requirements, use cases, test cases, tasks and any other items within a project, and across multiple projects, so when changes occur, as they often do, you can easily

• Assess the impact
• Keep the team aligned
• And, keep the project on track

Our philosophy for building the traceability features within Contour is “make it powerful, but keep it simple.”

And, the reason for our obsession with simplicity is because setting up trace relationships involves some time upfront to reap the benefits later on in the project life-cycle. So, the big question often becomes, “Is traceability worth the effort?”

What we’ve tried to do differently is make this process as fast and simple as possible within Contour, so it’s no longer a question of whether “it’s worth it” to do traceability. To illustrate our approach, we put together this short video.

Is traceablity valuable to your team? Is it hassle? We’re curious what you think.