Tracing in Rally still leaves a lot to be desired. Rally’s audit trail, especially for trace relationships, can’t be queried or sorted and it’s hard to use in reports. There is no notion of impact analysis when a requirement changes and typically no annotation on the change. It falls far short of my expectation for a complete trace solution.

That’s improved somewhat now with the recently announced new product integration with Jama’s Contour to tie requirements in Contour together with stories in Rally. I haven’t yet test-driven Contour or the Rally/Contour integration, but it’s something to keep in mind as I search for an integrated solution for agile traceability.

Basic traceability usually stacks up like this:

Product Requirements →
System and/or Software Specification →
Design →
Code →
Unit Tests →
Verification Tests →
Validation Tests

But that’s too simplistic for me. Where does hazard analysis and associated mitigations fit; why don’t we have a place for the stories and tasks that a development team uses to manage an iteration; what criteria do we use to ensure that traces are complete; where does architecture fit; what aspects of design are relevant; and most important for me: how does traceability help us to accept and embrace change throughout the product development process?

Lots of questions…

This will take some time to explore.