ANSWER

Tracking and managing requirements traceability offers several valuable benefits to a project:

• Minimize Risk and Manage Costs. Requirements traceability lets you identify and analyze the upstream and downstream impacts of any requirements change, so those impacts can be effectively managed and mitigated.
• Manage Scope. Traceability provides an understanding the relationships between requirements and identifies stakeholders who have a vested interest in each requirement, which supports better decision-making about project scope and proposed changes throughout the project.
• Improve Quality. Traceability allows individual requirements to be managed within the context of the full solution, and helps preserve the integrity of the end-state solution throughout each development cycle or product release. It also helps ensure that all requirements are fully tested and enables effective integration, system and regression testing.
• Increase Stakeholder Engagement. Requirements are clearly linked to vested stakeholders, giving greater visibility of the value achieved for each stakeholder group throughout the project lifecycle.
• Reduce Development Time. The ability to identify and manage groups of related requirements results in more efficient and effective planning, and streamlines product development.