Total Traceability – bi-directional, impact analysis, traceability report
Polarion ALM and Traceability in a Nutshell
The traceability data collection, editing, analysis, and reporting capabilities of Polarion ALM enable your organization to satisfy the strictest traceability and reporting requirements required for corporate governance and/or imposed by regulatory bodies.
Simply put: traceability is intrinsic to Polarion ALM. The unique, single-source repository-based architecture is designed from the outset to support traceability. All development artifacts are stored with versions and history in the underlying repository, and any artifact (requirement, test case, bug, change request, etc.) can linked to any other artifact, and all development artifacts can be linked to repository revisions of source code. It doesn't matter which Polarion ALM product your organization starts with or uses for development – when used correctly, traceability data is always collected and stored in the repository. The only way for this not to happen is not to use the artifact linking features available in every Polarion ALM product.
Work Item Linking: the key to total traceability
Traceability generally begins with Requirements. Whether defined using Polarion's exclusive Live Documents, or created directly in the portal, Requirements can be linked to the various tasks, change requests, etc. necessary to fulfill them – and linked with any of several possible relationships (implements, for example).
As engineering teams implement the tasks linked to Requirements, they commit revisions of source code to the repository. Maintaining linking from task to the resolving revision is fast and easy, and doesn't even require Polarion ALM: developers can simply cite the task's ID in a commit comment when they commit changes using Eclipse or their favorite Subversion client. Polarion ALM automatically links the code revision to the task, which is already linked to a requirement (and possibly to other relevant artifacts – test cases, for example – as well).
Simply by implementing a quick, easy step in your teams' process, the data needed for traceability from source to requirement, and across related artifacts is constantly collected and automatically maintained as people work day to day.
Traceability and Impact Analysis
With traceability links happening throughout your organization as part of your best practices, there comes a time when you need to begin analyzing traceability data. For this, you need Polarion ALM Enterprise. This product features a bi-directional traceability matrix view with traceability and impact analysis, plus special traceability querying capability enabling you to retrieve the data you need to study and/or report.
User Editable Traceability – a Polarion Innovation
You can find competing products featuring a traceability matrix, but traceability information is read-only. What if something got linked incorrectly? What if a link relationship is not the right one to meet your reporting requirements? What if your organization wants centralized control over traceability linking rather than leaving it up to teams? Polarion ALM Enterprise resolves all such issues, delivering the industry's first user editable traceability. Every link in the Traceability Matrix view is modifiable. Any errors or inaccuracies that occurred during development which would cause problems with compliance or reporting are quickly and easily fixed. If your organization requires strict, centralized control over traceability linking, the Traceability Matrix can be used to create the entire linking scheme.
Traceability Reports
Once you have achieved total traceability using the Polarion ALM platform, with the links needed to satisfy your requirements, you need to be able to generate reports to satisfy management or regulatory requirements. Polarion ALM Enterprise enables you to build traceability reports and export them to Microsoft® Excel™ format. Even when the number of work items in the report exceeds what is practical to display online in the portal interface (as can easily happen when you need a forensic level of reporting), you can still export whatever number of items are necessary.
The Traceability Report feature provides a number of options that enable you to include more or less detail in the exported report. In the exported Excel traceability report, all referenced work items are linked to URLs in the Polarion ALM portal. Details for any reported item, including its incoming and outgoing links to other items, are just a click away for any reader of the report.
What now?
May we suggest one of the following as a next step?
- Contact us for more information
- Download and evaluate: Download an evaluation copy of Polarion ALM. We recommend Polarion Requirements or Polarion ALM if you are interested in traceability.
- Read more: Learn about the benefits of Polarion's fully-integrated web based ALM solutions.
