Page "Traceability" Paragraph 9

In software development, the term traceability ( or Requirements Traceability ) refers to the ability to link product documentation requirements back to stakeholders ' rationales and forward to corresponding design artifacts, code, and test cases.

Traceability supports numerous software engineering activities such as change impact analysis, compliance verification or traceback of code, regression test selection, and requirements validation.

It is usually accomplished in the form of a matrix created for the verification and validation of the project.

Unfortunately the practice of constructing and maintaining a requirements trace matrix ( RTM ) can be very arduous and over time the traces tend to erode into an inaccurate state unless date / time stamped.

Alternate automated approaches for generating traces using information retrieval methods have been developed.