The complexity of telecom systems and their production, coupled with today's globalization of markets, customers, and development teams, have made it critical to define and institutionalize an effective strategy for requirements traceability. Being able to trace the life of requirements from their origin, through their allocation to components, to the finished product provides a basis for collaboration and control of functionality, quality, and changes. With the benefits of current software engineering techniques and tools, organizations can cost-effectively implement traceability aligned with the organization's business goals, software engineering maturity, project attributes, and team culture. Within Alcatel-Lucent, several business units have engaged in implementing traceability and our team has developed an automated traceability environment. Based on these experiences we present a framework of guidelines for designing effective traceability strategies and tools. Β© 2008 Alcatel-Lucent. organizational agreements. Multiple external suppliers also deliver components and services. Supporting the collaboration, managing the development, monitoring the project, and controlling the quality of the product in such distributed settings require methods and tools that, among other things, allow for open but secure information exchange and promote shared understanding of artifact and component dependencies.
Changes impacting releases and related teams are dynamic and significant and include feature and requirements churn caused by changing customer needs, business constraints, and technology evolution. Handling change effectively requires a shared understanding of the nature of changes and control of their impact. Current software engineering methodologies offer multiple approaches and practices for dealing with change, including traceability, risk management, agile methods, rigorous regression testing, comprehensive change management, and flexible software architectures.