[7] For example, it is common practice to capture verification relationships to demonstrate that a requirement is verified by a certain test artifact.
Traceability is especially relevant when developing safety-critical systems and therefore prescribed by safety guidelines, such as DO178C, ISO 26262, and IEC61508.
[4] Requirements come from different sources, like the business person ordering the product, the marketing manager and the actual user.
Furthermore, implementation artifacts will likely be in the form of source files, links to which can be established in various ways at various scopes.
Repository or tool stack integration can present a significant challenge to maintaining traceability in a dynamic system.
Traceability is realized by capturing traces either entirely manual or tool supported, e.g. as spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel.
Though widely applied, this process is cumbersome, error-prone, and often leads to traceability information that is of insufficient quality due to the various involved development tools and the typically very high number of artifacts to be traced.
A single ALM tool to cover requirements, risk analysis, system design, task management, code repositories, integration, testing and more is a classic trade-off between best-of-breed capabilities vs. a more limited feature, common platform.
The disadvantage of this approach is that different adapters or converters for the different artifact types are necessary that need to have a consistent version and data format.