REQUIREMENTS TRACING USING SUPERTRACE PC

The most critical task that SuperTrace PC performs is to maintain requirements. Maintaining requirements throughout a development life-cycle can be a daunting task. Depending on the type of development that is being undertaken, changes to the requirements may be required on a yearly, monthly, or even weekly basis. In addition, these changes are often quite significant and have a major impact on the requirements trace. SuperTrace PC provides assistance in this area by allowing an analyst flexibility when updating requirements. For
example, if the changes are minor, the analyst has the option of making changes to each affected requirement individually. However, if the changes are extensive, the analyst may re-import the new document and archive the older version. The older version is always recoverable.

The analyst may even perform a trace between the two documents to verify that no requirements were unintentionally dropped in the new version. Once requirements have been imported into the system, SuperTrace PC maintains the requirements along with all requirement related data. This data may include trace links, status, precedence, criticality, allocation, comments, classification, and document information. Trace links include both forward links (high-level to low-level detail) and backward links (low-level to high-level detail). The tool
maintains the integrity of a trace by automatically entering the corresponding back-link whenever a forward-link is entered and vice versa. The main requirement menu in SuperTrace PC is illustrated in Figure 1.