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What is Traceability & How to use AIO Tests’ Traceability Reports

What is Traceability & How to use AIO Tests’ Traceability Reports

February 11, 2025
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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 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?

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.

  1. Ensures the original requirements/goals have been covered by tests
  2. Acts as a plan for QA to understand the scope of testing
  3. Ability to show scope change impact on the entire process
  4. 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!!

Challenges of 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.

  • Manual Effort and Errors: Maintaining traceability in Excel involves manually linking requirements, test cases, and their corresponding results. This consumes time and increases the risk of human error, such as missing links or incorrect data entries.

  • Scalability Issues: As your business projects grow in size and complexity, managing traceability within spreadsheets becomes challenging. Tracking hundreds or thousands of requirements and test cases in a flat format quickly leads to chaos and unmanageability.

  • Lack of Real-Time Updates: Spreadsheets do not dynamically update. Any changes to requirements or test cases necessitate manual updates, increasing the risk of inconsistent information.

  • Collaboration Challenges: In team environments, sharing and updating a static file like Excel can lead to version control issues and miscommunication among team members.

What is 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:

  1. Requirements: A list of all the project's requirements, often derived from the project's functional specifications or user stories.
  1. Test Cases: A list of all the test cases designed to verify each requirement. Each test case should have a unique identifier for easy reference.
  1. Traceability Matrix: A table that shows the mapping between requirements and test cases. This matrix demonstrates which test cases are associated with each requirement and vice versa.
  1. Status: An indication of the status of each test case, such as "Passed," "Failed," "Not Run," or "Blocked." This status helps in monitoring the progress of testing efforts and identifying any unresolved issues.
  1. Comments and Defects: Any relevant comments, feedback, or defects found during testing can be documented in this section for further investigation and resolution.
  1. Coverage Analysis: A summary of the overall test coverage, indicating how many requirements have associated test cases and the percentage of test coverage achieved.

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 AIO Tests Simplifies Traceability?

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.

  • Traceability Summary: Summarized numbers related to coverage of requirements via cases that can be used for executive level reporting.
  • Traceability Detail: Tabular format, a more traditional look, with details about requirements, cases, executions/runs and linked bugs information.

Let’s dig deeper into how to use these reports in AIO Tests.

  1. Traceability Summary

Let’s run down a few scenarios.

  • As a manager, how will I know if all my requirements in the upcoming release are covered by testing?

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.

  • As a manager, how will I know if all my requirements in the upcoming release are covered, executed and if bugs have been found against them?

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.

  • Scenario 1: If you want to know the final execution status of your cases across cycles, use “Last Run”

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:

  1. Summary number boxes giving coverage details
  2. Charts showing case priority, execution status and defect status distribution
  3. Tabular view of all requirement level coverage and execution details

2. Traceability Detail


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.

Output of Traceability Detail report:

The report has 4 columns:

  1. Requirement — showing specified Jira requirements in a hierarchy
  2. Cases — cases linked to these requirements
  3. 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 shown
  4. Defects — details of linked defects

The benefit of this report is that in one glance you see everything happening with a requirement. How many times a case has been run and what were the results. This information can be extremely helpful in the decision making process.

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.