In today’s software development landscape, there is hardly any shortage of debates concerning the relative merits of practices, methods and certain techniques for design, analysis, and coding activities. One of the most talked about topic in this regard is the requirements traceability and the role is plays in defining and executing systems.

1. Features of Requirements Traceability Matrix
In today’s software development landscape, there is hardly any shortage of debates concerning the
relative merits of practices, methods and certain techniques for design, analysis, and coding activities.
One of the most talked about topic in this regard is the requirements traceability and the role is plays in
defining and executing systems. Though discussions regarding the same might have been going for
decades, and the tools are going to evolve to assist both more and less artifact traceability, there can be
very little doubt about one aspect, i.e. the requirements traceability has been an efficient technique in
some development methodologies, especially for those systems where software failure is no option.
Experience has made it evident that the capacity to trace requirements artifacts through the stages of
specification architecture, design, implementation and testing is an essential factor in ensuring a quality
software execution. The ability to track these relationships and assess the influence when change takes
place is common to several modern, high-assurance software processes, especially in the critical mission
activities.
Simply put, a traceability relationship is an association between two project elements. More precisely, a
requirements traceability matrix is set up by relating the requirements with the work products that
satisfy the. The tests are related with the requirements on which they are based and the product is
tested to cater the requirement. In requirements traceability matrix the relationship of driver to satisfier
can be one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, or many-to-many.
Today service providers specializing in application lifecycle management and requirements management
solutions offers help with requirements traceability matrix. It allows you to choose a relation first, and
depending on that, you are able to select personalized filters for every entity that are associated with
the relation that imposes a level of filtration of the linked records. The records of one entity are then
highlighted in a row while the others are shown in a column.
In addition to that, above the filtration imposed you can also select the records that you would like to
display. The options that are available are includes:
 All with the orphans highlighted i.e. having no linked records using this selected relation
 Only orphans
 Records that have linked records only
Furthermore, the requirements traceability matrix offers a complete visual representation of the entity
items that are related to one another by the means of the relationships. Utilizing this matrix end users
are able to set up new, edit and delete relationships by double clicking on the cell that appears in the
intersection of the two entity items.
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