Whether your company produces software or automobiles, the components and artifacts that make up your engineered products will come from multiple sources to form a whole. Your engineering team may use a wide variety of tools and applications to engineer systems, and your production process may involve third-party providers and distributors along your supply chain.
Altogether, this creates a complex engineering environment where it is extremely challenging to achieve traceability.
Requirements traceability refers to the ability to describe the origins, development processes, and specifications of a systems requirement or engineering artifact, as well as its relationship with other products in the development process. For safety-critical systems, traceability is a mandatory process—critical requirements must be both implemented and validated to meet standards such as ISO 26262 and others.
If your engineers are jumping from platform to platform—if there are multiple repositories of data in your production line, you need an integrated traceability solution to pull that data together, meet standards, and streamline your engineering processes.
The State of Current Integrated Traceability Solutions
At present, many engineering teams are struggling with traceability because their platforms and applications cannot record relationships to objects outside of their own data repository systems. This is often due to data being stored in proprietary formats which don’t integrate with other applications, or due to a lack of platform integration altogether.
Without a proper solution in place, there is a silo effect. In order to achieve traceability for each artifact, ownership must be established manually.
Solutions to address this problem often fall short. Even with a solution in place, traceability must often be achieved retroactively, causing delays and increasing risk in the process.
Most importantly, a lack of traceability and the inherent risk of manual processes can lead to high costs. If you are non-compliant, you could lose opportunities. If your finished products encounter a problem, it will be a long, costly, manual process to probe and retrace the issue to a corresponding requirement in the design.
What To Expect From an Integrated Traceability Solution
A traceability solution should do more than provide you with a mere pathway to compliance. By achieving integration through linking your various repositories, your solution should provide you with traceability through single platform that’s easy to access, understand, and report on.
The thread of engineering will always go through multiple platforms, many of which will not communicate with each other because of proprietary formatting and other barriers. For example, your systems engineers will likely need to use separate applications to build models, build artifacts, and test their products.
Integrated traceability solutions, such as OSLC Connect products, link engineering applications to a single tracking product like Jira, providing you with full visibility into your applications, comprehensive traceability of your products, and agile project management.
The solution connects your workflows across repositories, so you can leverage your enterprise solutions to meet traceability requirements in addition to project management.
Today, cross repository reporting is critical for providing proof of compliance. Without a solution that brings all your disparate engineering data into one place, producing that proof can be a costly process. Integrated traceability solutions are not a luxury to have – they are vital to your engineering efforts.