Traceability also provides essential project information that often can’t be obtained in any other way. It provides testers with an easily understandable and reportable measure of product quality. By knowing which requirements remain unsatisfied, and whether they have issues logged against them, testers can estimate the time remaining to product completion. Last, traceability enables teams to better understand the work remaining, and in which functional areas of the product that work remains.
Managing requirements, test cases, and defects using Microsoft Word or Excel is challenging enough. But tracing requirements through test cases to defects and back to requirements is impossible without a real tracking system.
