This article was originally published on 07/08/2019 and was updated on 10/18/2024
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), nearly 35 million vehicles were recalled in 2023 just in the United States. Most recalls tend to be minor, but the risks associated with major oversights are a significant cause for concern. Many complex industries require formal process reviews, especially in the field of engineering compliance, to ensure that efficient and effective processes are in place, and to reduce project delivery risk. As a result, traceability is an essential piece of the puzzle to keep in mind.
Traceability refers to the ability to formally identify the provenance, motivation, and relations between engineering artifacts.
It is also one of the key methods to counter the growing complexity of product development. Traceability is mandatory in order to comply with all safety-related standard processes: DO-178, DO-254, ISO 26262, IEC 61508, and derivatives.
Traceability is not only mandated for safety-critical systems but also increases the understandability of complex interrelations and thus, the quality and the speed at which a project can react to change.
By formally recording the relations between elements in the engineering process, it is possible to identify the impact a change in one element will have across the project. This impact analysis immediately identifies which parts of the architecture, design, tests, or software may need to be changed to adapt to a requested or mandated change.
True game changers among the Product Development Team, traceability enables:
While traceability is an essential aspect of a complex systems project, it is even more challenging to achieve across an engineering team due to the use of a wide array of applications during the engineering process (and across multiple disciplines). Researchers also claimed as a recent study reported that “traceability is still a sought-after, yet often elusive quality in software-intensive systems”
The individual applications are often unable to record relationships to elements outside of their repositories, and worse, the repositories themselves are often closed or store information in proprietary formats that prevent external applications from seeing or linking to their data.
Even if the technical means are provided, the lack of ease in creating the traceability information hinders adoption. As most projects lack a clear owner for the traceability aspect of engineering data, there is no one to “herd” the engineering team into compliance.
Very often a project is still forced to retroactively, and manually, recreate the traceability at the end of a project in order to deliver. This task requires engineers to stop all engineering activities, or external hires, to create Excel spreadsheets or other documents to capture the links across the engineering artifacts and software. Not only is this extremely expensive, but it also removes the benefit of having traceability throughout the design process.
According to our estimations and the testimonials of our interlocutors in the field, this task requires Three months of effort per engineer across the entire engineering team. However, an efficient process for accomplishing traceability would make the engineering team much more effective and responsive. The act of creating traceability has become a documentation task instead of an engineering task where it belongs.
Failure to comply with these processes can be extremely expensive. This can range from the impossibility of bidding on projects to the impossibility of delivering functional products after development. It can even lead to tragedies that can cost lives. Traceability accounts for the quality and reliability needed in fields like aerospace, two factors that are literally matters of life and death in the industry.
A few years ago, when the critical issues with the MCAS malfunctions in Boeing 737 planes arose, James Somers, writer, and programmer, reminded us that the FAA “mandates that every requirement for a piece of safety-critical software be traceable to the lines of code that implement it, and vice versa... So every time a line of code changes, it must be retraced to the corresponding requirement in the design document, and you must be able to demonstrate that the code actually satisfies the requirement.”.
A reminder that echoes more than ever today...
Requirements traceability tools make it easier to establish trace relationships between artifacts. Some all-in-one solutions -such as IBM ELM- provide integrated tools that work together to offer full traceability across the engineering process.
However, for teams working with specialized tools such as Jira for change management, IBM DOORS Next for requirements management, and Siemens Polarion Test Management, providing traceability capabilities may not be as simple.
With OSLC Connect for Jira, you can bridge the traceability capability gap across your development applications. You can create relationships between Jira issues, DNG requirements, and Polarion test cases, providing full traceability across your artifacts.