See Traceability Connections and Coverage Gaps at a Glance
When requirements change, engineering teams need a fast, reliable way to understand connected work, assess potential impacts, and identify gaps in traceability.
The new Trace View Canvas in Jama Connect transforms complex relationship data into a clear, interactive view, helping teams accelerate impact analysis and make confident decisions as projects evolve.
- Visualize upstream and downstream relationships.
- Explore multiple levels of traceability.
- Identify missing coverage and traceability gaps.
- Create relationships directly from the canvas.
- Switch between the visual canvas and classic grid while preserving saved configurations.
Trace View Canvas will debut in beta with Jama Connect 9.40 and 9.41.
Transcript
Hello. I’m Mario Maldari, Technical Director here at Jama Software. Today, I’ll give you an overview of our new Trace View Canvas.
When a requirement changes, you need to understand what it’s connected to, what will be affected, how far that impact extends, and whether anything is missing.
Trace View Canvas answers those questions visually. Starting from a single item or a set of items, you can explore traceability upstream and downstream across multiple levels. You can also create missing relationships directly from the canvas, making it easier to assess change and build confidence in your project’s traceability.
Before we move into the canvas, it’s important to understand what guides it. What you’re seeing here is the project’s traceability information model, or TIM. It defines how different item types are allowed to relate and which relationships are required to achieve complete coverage.
In previous videos, we’ve discussed how Live Traceability Explorer uses the same traceability information model to provide a traceability score, which can be improved over time by closing requirement and test trace gaps.
Trace View Canvas also uses this model as its compass. It determines what appears upstream, what appears downstream, and how you can navigate from one level to the next.
Just as importantly, it tells the canvas what should be connected but isn’t, identifying missing relationships.
With that foundation in place, let’s open the canvas and see it in action.
I can open Trace View Canvas from a single item, from a list of items contained in a component or set, or from items returned by a filter.
You’re then given two options: Trace View Grid, the classic matrix representation of Trace View, and Trace View Canvas, which provides a visual representation of the source items as tiles, along with their upstream and downstream traces.
Each tile represents an item. For every tile, we can see the item ID, the item name, and an indication of whether any expected coverage is missing.
In this example, coverage is missing for this product requirement.
We can consult the TIM to see what is needed. It appears that we’re missing a relationship to a system requirement.
I can remediate that directly within the canvas.
The view automatically refreshes to show that the missing coverage has been resolved.
Just as in Trace View Grid, we can open an item and edit its content using the slide-out panel.
From any item, we can also view related items upstream and downstream.
The blue boxes indicate the number of items related upstream or downstream from an item.
We can open the relationship tree by selecting a blue box. From there, we can continue drilling down to expose the complete traceability path.
To navigate the canvas, we can zoom in, zoom out, focus on the source items, or fit the complete picture on the screen.
Each level can be filtered independently by item type, and the configuration can be saved for future use.
Saved configurations are also preserved when you switch between Trace View Grid and Trace View Canvas.
We hope this video has shown how our reimagined Trace View makes it easier to see and explore relationships across your project.
To learn more about optimizing your process, visit us at jamasoftware.com.
If you’re already a Jama Connect customer, contact your customer success manager or Jama Software consultant for additional guidance and insights.
Thank you.
