Discussion on:

Ensure requirements are tracked throughout a project

This is real world,hands on stuff.

The easiest way to track requirements is to have requirement->usecase->functionality mapping. This is to be updated continuously by the sys arch and be seen by all. By this every one will be aware about the basic requirements.

I wonder if there is any post that provides guidelines on how to breakdown a requirement into small independant components. I need this to make sure that the testing phase takes care of producing test cases for each of these independant components.

Greetings, Subha. I believe you are searching for Tom's posts on WBS Decomposition. I do remember seeing such posts here before - will update with the link(s) once I come across them again...

Edit - here is the link I mentioned earlier, Subha: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-manager/?p=393

.. Hope that helps...

This requiremnt tracing is in its simplest form. How do you trace requirement in a project where you have 15/17 features running.

One solution which we have is to the back a backward tracability, i.e., in your DRD, HLD, DD, UT you have a matrix. Like a module in DD will correspond to 2 modules/sections in HLD, which in turn correspond to 4/5 requirements in your DRD. And UT can be place for the PM to look up.

But again, if you have large number of features being handled, how you do it? Is there any other way?

Thanks,
Satya Narayan, Bangalore

I think requirements tracking, in spite of it's importance, should (almost) never be done by programmers,
I've noticed that it's usually boring for them (many times, technical people only want to code and are not interested in satisfaying the user's needs at all). Of course coding is probably the most important activity, but it's not everything in a software project.