I have been asked to create a traceability matrix that maps between the Requirements and Design document. I am having a lot of trouble working out how I link a single requirement to the design as the link is nearly always 1:M and is therefore difficult to map and maintain. Can any point be in the direction of any examples, or provide some advice on how you manage the matrix in this context. Requirements to Testing makes sense to me, however I fail to see why I need Requirements to Design, apparently this is required for our CMMI3 audit.
Thanks for the help
It appears to me like you are talking about the role of a requirements analyst. There are various tools to help in this process, the leading commercial contender is IBM Doors. Although I believe this can equally well be acheieved using a wiki and hyperlinks within wiki pages to denote dependancy and linkage.
If you have a Requirements Spec and a Design and they aren’t already linked in some way then your boss has missed the point of Requirements Management in the first place.
Requirements should guide the design process and be linked from the beginning not merely linked afterwards to keep an auditor happy. Anything you design should be done in a particular way to meet a requirement.
To cut a long story short… Personally, I would stick both the Requirements and the design in a wiki and link them together as I mentioned above. You’re basically being asked to make the documentation for a process that either didn’t occur or wasn’t written down.