Ensuring traceability

Tracing back your design is the process of looking at your final output, and identifying the source requirements and their respective user needs to ensure they are all met. Going through this process has two great advantages:

Without performing a traceability analysis, you risk releasing a product which does not fulfil all of your user needs or requirements. This may not seem that bad at first, you can easily add those features, especially where releasing an update to your users can be as easy as clicking a single button. However, when working directly with clients — instead of the consumer market — your company can face contract penalties for not delivering what was detailed in the original agreement. In cases where your company is in a highly regulated space such as the automotive, medical, or nuclear sectors, not documenting your process and ensuring your design output traces back to your user needs (inputs) can lead to stiff fines or even having your product pulled from the market by the governing agencies.

Traceability also has the unintended benefit of making it easier and more effective when it comes time to test your product. By ensuring your design output can be directly traced back to a requirement — and that there are no additional unaccounted features — your test teams are able to perform ‘black box testing’. By performing black box testing, the test teams can specifically look for missing or unexpected functionality ensuring that the product conforms to exactly what is required of it. The alternative here would be testing against the individual product features. This may sound like the same thing — however testing against requirements means your testers are looking for what the user asked for, versus testing based on what the developers say the a feature should do. Testing individual product features may show that each feature works as expected, but it does not test to see if your product overall is “correct”.

Design Forge offers a few unique features designed to help you and your team throughout the life of your project. When your first User Need is added, Design Forge will begin tracking the completeness of fulfilling those user needs and the number of requirements that address each individual User Need.

If one of your user needs are not satisfied, there will be a visual indication for each user need and for your project’s user need column as a whole:

Design Forge provides the same functionality for each requirement — ensuring that they are met with one or more design elements providing immediate feedback to project stakeholders. If a more detailed breakdown is required Design Forge can export a traceability matrix; a document which indicates the design elements which fulfil each requirement and the requirements which fulfil each user need. By using this document, you can easily determine which design inputs or technical elements are missing from your project.

Design Forge simplifies creating technical documentation for your project with features such as:

Design Forge helps improve your project documentation and design from the concept phase all the way to design. Start using Design Forge for free, and see for yourself how it can help improve your projects.

This article is the last part of a 4-part series covering how to build up your project on Design Forge. Check out our previous articles on writing user needs, converting user needs to requirements, and designing your product.

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