Mapping and validating every requirement in a release with test cases can be complex. Without a clear mapping, gaps can go unnoticed, impacting the quality of the final product
That’s where Traceability comes in, and it ensures you can map every requirement to its corresponding test case, giving you complete visibility into your QA testing process. It’s about ensuring every feature is validated and no functionality slips through the cracks.
However, executing traceability can be challenging, especially when relying on traditional tools like spreadsheets. These methods are manual and time-consuming and prone to errors, making them difficult to keep up with.
This is where AIO Tests steps in to simplify the process. With its Traceability Reports, AIO Tests transforms how teams manage testing, ensuring smarter workflows and better insights. In this blog, you’ll learn what traceability is, why it’s crucial, and how AIO Tests can make it effortless.
What is Traceability Testing in Software Development?
Traceability allows you to trace your requirements through a quality process, ensuring you are delivering what was agreed upon in the requirements. It is a key element for managers to monitor throughout the project.
A project’s requirements need to be validated through testing. Traceability can be achieved by linking your requirements to test cases. This makes traceability a key performance indicator (KPI) of the project.
Below are the key benefits of maintaining traceability apart from it being a KPI.
- Ensures the original requirements/goals have been covered by tests
- Acts as a plan for QA to understand the scope of testing
- Ability to show the scope change impact on the entire process
- Understand testing progress
Traditionally, Excel was used to maintain traceability as it was easy to read. But maintaining traceability through Excel is a very manual and time-consuming task, and the coordination it takes is UNIMAGINABLE!!
What Are the Key Challenges in Maintaining Traceability?
Traceability can be challenging, especially when using traditional methods such as Excel or spreadsheets. While these tools are readily available and familiar, they present significant limitations that interfere with the effective management of complex software testing processes.
What is a Quality Assurance Traceability Report
A Quality Assurance (QA) Traceability Report is a document that provides detailed information about the relationships between the various components of a project’s quality assurance activities. It is used to track and ensure that all requirements and test cases are properly linked and tested, offering a clear picture of how the project’s testing efforts align with the specified requirements.
The primary purpose of a QA Traceability Report is to ensure that:
- Each requirement is covered by one or more test cases.
- All test cases are associated with specific requirements.
This helps validate that the project’s deliverables meet quality standards and ensures no critical functionality is overlooked during testing. The report typically includes the following elements:
The QA Traceability Report is crucial for project management, quality assurance teams, and stakeholders as it provides transparency into the testing process. It ensures that all aspects of the project’s requirements are validated. It helps in identifying any gaps in testing and enables efficient tracking of defects back to their root cause, ensuring the project’s quality is maintained throughout its development lifecycle.
Nowadays, almost all the test management tools offer some or the other kind of traceability matrix or traceability report as part of the system.
But AIO Tests offer a comprehensive view of traceability. Let’s explore it in detail.
How to Overcome Challenges in Traceability Testing with AIO Tests
All-In-One Tests (AIO Tests) is a simple and easy-to-use testing tool for Jira. This makes it very simple to create Traceability Reports in Jira, as shown in the video below.
It currently offers 2 traceability reports — Traceability Summary and Traceability Detail.
Let’s dig deeper into how to use these reports in AIO Tests.
Let’s run down a few scenarios.
The input screen of AIO Tests’ Summary report is as below. It lets one specify requirements via JQL (other options are a list of Jira issues, saved Jira Filters).
- Include Child Issues: select this if full hierarchy of a Jira issue is required (Epic -> Story -> Task). If certain issue types need to be ignored, the filter can help
- Cumulate Requirements Data: select this if information should be rolled up to the parent issue
Clicking on Generate with just the input of issue IDs would return the number of tests against each issue and thus help in coverage analysis.
The Requirements section remains the same. But now let’s also specify the execution cycles in which cases of the specified requirements were run, and check the box for retrieving any linked defects.
The merge strategy is incredibly unique, and here is how it works.
What “all runs” does is it considers the status of a case from all the cycles to determine the final status. In this case, after merging, the final status of case 1 will be failed.
If the user specified “last run”, then only the latest run result would be shown (in this case, “Passed”), and it would be incorrect.
Output:
The generated report has 3 sections:
- Summary number boxes giving coverage details
- Charts showing case priority, execution status and defect status distribution
- Tabular view of all requirement level coverage and execution details
Output of Traceability Detail report:
Traceability Detail provides a more traditional — tabular/matrix — look of the traceability report showing the requirements, linked cases, execution of those cases and linked defects.
- Requirement — showing specified Jira requirements in a hierarchy
- Cases — cases linked to these requirements
- Test Execution Results — execution details (status, cycle, date of execution & who executed the case)
- Include Only Last Run checked: for each case, only the latest run status is shown
- Include Only Last Run not checked: for each case, status of all runs in each cycle will be show
The benefit of this report is that, at a glance, you see everything happening with a requirement. How many times a case has been run and what the results were — this information can be extremely useful when making decisions.
Conclusion
To summarize, Traceability reports are extremely helpful in understanding how your testing is going and if all your product requirements are being tested thoroughly. It helps QA Managers to understand the testing progress and how time is being spent, and for project managers to understand which areas need more focus from a development perspective.
