Traceability
August 17, 2008
You've written requirements. You've created a detailed use cases, and unit tests, and reviewed all three. Code is delivered, passes system testing, moves on to UAT. Whoa, holdup there fella, where's the data validation that prevents the user from doing X? Its right there in the requirements. What happened? Not only was it missed in the unit testing (and possibly use cases), but it was missed in the review process as well.
Traceability might be the gap here. Traceability is the notion that you should be able to track a single requirement from the requirements document through to the use cases, detailed design / technical specs (if created), and into the testing phases. This, of course, requires that everything be clearly numbered and labeled. Thus it should be possible to give a cursory glance at the documents and look for any missing numbers.
It all starts then with a well-formatted business requirements document. Lately I've found it useful to create a simple table that lists out all the requirements that the business requestor and the software architect have come up with, grouping them together by logical function and labeling them as evident or hidden. This latter labeling helps communicate with the business when you've listed out something that must happen "behind the scenes", which they might not have thought about.
| Number | Requirement | Category |
| Application - Login | ||
| R1.1 | User must log in to the application with username | Evident |
| R1.2 | Log user information in the database for security auditing | Hidden |
| Application - Some functional grouping | ||
| R2.1 | Enter data X, Y, and X | Evident |
| R2.2 | Validate that value for field X is an integer | Hidden |
| R2.3 | Record data values in the database | Hidden |
With such a simple table, it becomes rather easy to list out all the requirements reference numbers in functional requirements, use cases, design, and unit tests. If R2.2 is not covered in the unit tests, then reject the unit tests.
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