Requirements Traceability Matrix

[kwalford]

Who uses this technique and what metrics do you trace (record)?

Any example ones would be good - thank you.

[begeland]

I used this a lot earlier in my career when I was working on large government contracts. We would respond to RFPs with lengthy proposals and develop a requirements traceability matrix as part of our proposal response. We would parse out every requirement possible from the RFP into the matrix and in one column we would identify where in the proposal that requirement was addressed. In another column, upon award of the contract and subsequent development of the solution, we would identify where in the system that requirement was addressed. That way we were certain to build all of the requirements into our proposal response and the government agency could easily find where, in our response, each requirement was addressed. Then we also knew that we developed the system to include each requirement and it was also very helpful at system testing and user acceptance time as we built use cases and test scenarios and then tested out the solution.
Brad