jama-logo-primary
  • Product
    • JAMA CONNECT®
      • Product Overview
      • Features
      • Integrations
      • Pricing and Licensing
      • Why Jama?
      • Trial
    • Customer Success
      • Success Programs
      • Support
      • Community
  • Solutions
    • Solution by Industry
      • Aerospace and Defense
      • Automotive
      • Software Development
      • Financial Services and Insurance
      • Government
      • Industrial Manufacturing
      • Medical Device & Life Sciences
      • Semiconductor
    • Solution by Function
      • Requirements Management
      • Requirements Traceability
      • Risk Management
      • Test Management
      • MBSE
    • Compare
      • IBM® DOORS®
      • DOORS® Next®
      • Jira® Software
      • Polarion
  • Company
    • Company Information
      • About Us
      • Leadership
      • Careers
      • Requirements Traceability Alliance
      • Partners
      • Customers
      • Contact Us
    • News and Events
      • Events
      • Press Room
  • Resources
    • Content Library
    • Guide to Requirements Management and Traceability
    • Discovery Center
    • Customer Stories
    • Webinars
    • Product Demos
    • Support
    • Community
  • Blog
  • Get Started
  • Search
  • Menu Menu
Follow a manual added link
Follow a manual added link

The Essential Guide to Requirements Management and Traceability

Chapters
  • 1. Requirements Management
    • Overview
    • 1 What is Requirements Management?
    • 2 Why do you need Requirements Management?
    • 3 Four Fundamentals of Requirements Management
    • 4 Adopting an Agile Approach to Requirements Management
    • 5 Conquering the 5 Biggest Challenges of Requirements Management
    • 6 Three Reasons You Need a Requirements Management Solution
  • 2. Writing Requirements
    • Overview
    • 1 Functional requirements examples and templates
    • 2 Product requirements document template and examples
    • 3 How to write system requirement specification (SRS) documents
    • 4 Adopting the EARS Notation to Improve Requirements Engineering
    • 5 Jama Connect Advisor™
    • 6 Frequently Asked Questions about the EARS Notation and Jama Connect Requirements Advisor
    • 7 How to Write an Effective Product Requirements Document
    • 8 Functional vs. Non-Functional Requirements
    • 9 What Are Non-Functional Requirements and How Do They Impact Product Development?
    • 10 Characteristics of Effective Software Requirements and Software Requirements Specifications (SRS)
    • 11 8 Do’s and Don’ts for Writing Requirements
  • 3. Requirements Gathering and Management Processes
    • Overview
    • 1 Requirements Engineering
    • 2 Requirements Analysis
    • 3 Requirements Gathering Techniques for Agile Product Teams
    • 4 A Guide to Requirements Elicitation for Product Teams
    • 5 What is requirements gathering?
    • 6 Defining and Implementing a Requirements Baseline
    • 7 How Long Do Requirements Take?
  • 4. Requirements Traceability
    • Overview
    • 1 What is Traceability?
    • 2 What is Requirements Traceability and Why Does It Matter for Product Teams?
    • 3 How to Create and Use a Requirements Traceability Matrix
    • 4 Live Traceability vs. After-the-Fact Traceability
    • 5 How to Overcome Organizational Barriers to Live Requirements Traceability
    • 6 Requirements Traceability, What Are You Missing?
    • 7 Four Best Practices for Requirements Traceability
    • 8 Requirements Traceability: Links in the Chain
    • 9 What Are the Benefits of End-to-End Traceability During Product Development?
  • 5. Requirements Management Tools and Software
    • Overview
    • 1 Selecting the Right Requirements Management Tools and Software
    • 2 Why Investing in Requirements Management Software Makes Business Sense During an Economic Downturn
    • 3 Application lifecycle management (ALM)
    • 4 Is There Life After DOORS®? 
    • 5 Checklist: Selecting a Requirements Management Tool
  • 6. Requirements Validation and Verification
    • Overview
    • 1 Requirements Verification and Validation for Product Teams
  • 7. Meeting Regulatory Compliance and Industry Standards
    • Overview
    • 1 Understanding ISO Standards
    • 2 A Guide to Automotive Safety Integrity Levels (ASIL)
    • 3 Compliance Management
    • 4 What is FMEA? Failure Modes and Effects Analysis
    • 5 What’s a Design History File, and How Are DHFs Used by Product Teams?
  • 8. Project Management
    • Overview
    • 1 Managing Project Scope — Why It Matters and Best Practices
  • 9. Measuring Requirements
    • Overview
    • 1 Identifying and Measuring Requirements Quality
    • 2 Status Request Changes
  • 10. Systems Engineering
    • Overview
    • 1 What is Systems Engineering?
    • 2 The Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge (SEBoK)
    • 3 What is MBSE? Model-Based Systems Engineering Explained
  • Glossary

How to Overcome Organizational Barriers to Live Requirements Traceability

Live Requirements Traceability™

Achieving Live Traceability™ of product requirements, as necessitated by industry standards, across siloed engineering teams and tools, is the #1 unsolved problem for most product development organizations. One of the main barriers is that each engineering discipline (systems, software, hardware, electrical, risk, verification and validation) has optimized its own process and tools. When looking at the end-to-end product development process siloed teams, tools, and data make it very challenging to trace development activity from initial requirement definition through development and testing.

As a result, requirements traceability becomes a time-consuming, error-prone, frustrating, and manual, after-the-fact process. The inability for the product development organization to continually trace ongoing development efforts and changes back to user and system requirements results in missed requirements, defects, rework, delays, audit letters, and cost overruns.

No common platform exists

The typical approach to solve this generic process problem with software is to force every user onto a single platform and follow one common process. This works for standard business processes in HR, Sales, and Finance, but engineering disciplines across systems, software, hardware, electrical, risk, test, verification, and validation each follow different methodologies and use multiple tools including spreadsheets, desktop, and homegrown applications. Each engineering discipline has optimized their own development environment and strongly resist any attempts to change. Engineering leadership defers to each engineering discipline to define how to best do their work and is loath to dictate processes and tools that will negatively impact the performance and morale of each engineering team.

In addition to the organizational barriers to standardization, no single platform is even close to currently existing which replaces these dozens of tools. A single platform would need to cover all of the following software categories AND address all functionality in spreadsheets (Excel), scripts, desktop, and homegrown tools: Requirements Management, CAD, MBSE, DFMEA/FMEA, software task management, software code management, automated software testing, hardware bench test tools, ALM, PLM, and more. Current efforts by legacy vendors to create a common SaaS platform to span all these software categories and reach parity with best-of-breed tools is moving very slowly.

RELATED ARTICLE: Requirements Traceability: How to Go Live

How to achieve Live Requirements Traceability™ without forcing change on engineering teams

So how does an organization achieve Live Traceability across a best-of-breed tool environment supporting disparate methodologies, terminologies, fields, and statuses? The answer is a 3-step approach:

Step One | Live Traceability Model

Define a Live Traceability model across the end-to-end product development process with relationship rules for the traceable data elements across best-of-breed tools. An automotive functional safety example is shown below. Here you can see the operational instantiation of functional safety standards requirements in a relationship model within Jama Connect®. All necessary traceable information is included with continuous syncs to best-of-breed tools within engineering teams to deliver Live Traceability.

Step Two | Adaptive Data Field Mapping

To achieve Live Traceability, integrations with best-of-breed tools (such as those shown in the example) are required. The typical integration approach standardizes field names and statuses to ensure consistency across the connected tool, but this does not achieve the dual objective of Live Traceability with no changes required in how each engineering team works. Alternately, the proven approach is to apply adaptive data field mapping to ensure no change to engineering teams’ fields and statuses which simultaneously ensures a consistent, process wide, Live Traceability model. This is achieved through robust mapping and normalization logic functionality to easily address the various approaches taken by each engineering team.

Step Three | Management by Exception

Once Live Traceability is achieved, engineering organizations can — for the first time — manage the end-to-end product development process in real time, identify exceptions to the process early, and take action to significantly reduce defects, rework, delays, and cost overruns.

Check Out Our Webinar: Best Practices for Requirements Traceability

REQUIREMENTS TRACEABILITY

Requirements Traceability: is the tracking of requirements throughout the product development lifecycle.

Ready to Find Out More?

Our team of experts is here to answer any questions and learn how we can help enable 
your continued success. Get started by filling out this form so we can connect!

CONTACT US
Next Up: Requirements Traceability, What Are You Missing?
Previous: Live Traceability vs. After-the-Fact Traceability

CONNECT WITH US

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Youtube

USA
135 SW Taylor Suite 200
Portland, Oregon, 97204

EUROPE
Amsterdam Queens Tower
Delflandlaan 1, 1062EA Amsterdam
The Netherlands

© 2023 Jama Software

  • JAMA CONNECT
  • Product Overview
  • Pricing and Licensing
  • Success Programs
  • Trial
  • COMPANY
  • About Us
  • Careers
  • Customers
  • Press Room
  • Contact Us
  • RESOURCES
  • Resource Library
  • Events
  • Press Room
  • Blog
  • Success Programs
  • User Community
  • Support
  • Privacy Policy
  • Cookies
  • Privacy and Security
  • Legal
  • Preferences
Scroll to top