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

This is a discussion of the essential features of product development traceability maps in relation to requirements, architecture, functional models, components, and tests as a set of order type hierarchies and their cross-links. This paper lays out the structure of these ideal traceability relationships that define the essence of the product under development. The importance of the trace relationships to the product is clarified and then the abandonment of traceability in the Agile approach is discussed. Following that, a way to transform between synthetic canonical narrative (story) representations that appear in the product backlog and the traditionally separate hierarchical form of the trace structure of the product will be examined. The fact that it is possible to transform back and forth between the canonic narrative and traditional hierarchical representations of trace structures, and the fact that trace structures can be produced in a ‘just in time’ fashion that evolves during product development demonstrate that these trace structures can be used in both an Agile and Lean fashion within the development process. Also, we can show that when the trace structure is produced outside the narrative representation it can have the additional benefit of helping to determine the precedent order of development so that rework can be avoided. The lack of the extrinsic external trace structure of the product that gives access to its intelligibility is, in fact, a form of technical debt. Thus, traditional trace structures using this model can be seen as an essential tool for product owners to produce sound and coherent development narratives and for structuring and prioritizing the backlog in the Agile and Lean approaches to software and systems development.