Wednesday, October 31, 2012

The Essential Nature of Product Traceability and its relation to Agile Approaches


Working Paper written for INCOSE2013

Discussion of the essential features of product traceability maps in relation to requirements, architecture, functional models, components and tests as a set of order type hierarchies and their crosslinks. The paper lays out the structure of these ideal traceability relations which define the essence of the product under development. Then the intrinsic connection of these trace relations to the representations of the product design is discussed. The importance of the trace relations to the product are made clear and then abandonment of traceability in Agile approaches is discussed, and a way to transform between narrative (story) representations that appear in the product backlog and the canonical form of the trace structure of the product is discussed. The fact that it is possible to transform back and forth between narrative and canonic representations of trace structures, and the fact that trace structures can be produced in a just in time fashion that evolves during product development shows that it these trace structures can be used in both an agile and lean fashion within the development process. Also it is shown how by doing trace structure outside the narrative representation has the additional benefit of helping to determine the precedent order of development so rework can be avoided by developing component out of sequence that their technological infrastructure and architectural expression of capability demands. Thus canonical trace structures using this model can be seen as an essential tool for product owners to use to help structure and prioritize the backlog in the Agile approach to software and systems development.