DB

First Discussion.

For this week’s discussion board we’re going to collectively practicing “tracing” Rosa County’s business requirements, solution requirements, and tasks together. As referenced in this week’s lecture materials, a Traceability Matrix is a very useful tool for verifying that a project’s tasks and solution requirements do in fact support its business requirements. This seemingly easy task is actually more difficult than it sounds, as many people discover when they attempt to create the Traceability Matrix that is part of your individual assignment this week. So let’s practice developing a matrix together before you try it on your own.

Step 1: Refer back to some of the business requirements we identified for Rosa County in the week 1 discussion board. Select TWO business requirements to use for this discussion board. You can re-use the business requirements you personally developed or you can choose another requirement someone else identified.

Step 2: Refer back to some of the solution requirements we identified for Rosa County in the week 3 discussion board (again, these solution requirements can be the ones you wrote, or from someone else.) Select at least TWO solution requirements that support the business requirements you chose in step 1 (two solution requirements per business requirement.) In other words, which solution requirements, once fulfilled, support your business requirements?

Step 3: Look at the solution requirements you chose in step 2. If we were to build a WBS for the Rosa County project, what WBS elements or activities would your solution requirements call for?

Step 4: Post to the discussion board by “tracing” your chosen business requirement, solution requirements, and WBS elements/activities together. Do this by showing in your discussion board post (in either text, tabular or some other graphic form) a left-to-right link between the 3 items, roughly as follows:

Business requirement → Solution requirements → WBS elements/activities

Step 5: Briefly, have you ever heard of a Traceability Matrix, prior to this class (either by that name or another similar deliverable?) Have you ever used one? And, whether you've used a traceability matrix in the past or not, can you think of a project where developing a traceability matrix would have helped the project be more successful?

(p.s. This activity is the “tracing” function discussed in this week’s lecture materials on slides 18-19. You'll be doing this for your individual assignment this week as well, except rather than doing this for one business requirement you’ll do this for ALL your case study business requirements, solution requirements, and WBS elements. EVERY piece of your WBS much link to at least one solution requirement AND one business requirement, and vice versa. (Do you see, by doing this, we’re ensuring that no WBS elements are superfluous, meaning we don’t have any “extra” tasks, and we don’t have any business requirements that aren’t supported? It is a tedious task, but it also keeps us from wasting resources or finishing a project and still not supporting the original business requirements the project was undertaken to satisfy.)

Second Discussion:

Hi, everyone!  Thanks for your posts this week.  As I've been discussing with you I had a similar question often enough I thought I'd just ask the question as a separate thread completely:

What do you think about numbering systems within a traceability matrix?  I have noticed some of us have numbered their requirements and WBS elements in their matrices, and some of us have not.

Should there be numbering within a matrix?  Or is that simply confusing, since the WBS is already numbered?  (Or, should requirement numbering and WBS numbering be linked together somehow?)