Link requirements

Traceability — from requirements to implementation tasks and source code, to tests, to defects and fixes — is an important issue for many organizations, especially those in industries where rigorous regulatory mandates must be met, and compliance must be verifiable. Polarion makes this kind of deep and broad traceability both easy to achieve, and highly visible. For many projects, the process starts with the requirements.

The key to success is timely linking of requirements to others, and to other artifact types representing such things as QA test cases and defect reports, and engineering tasks and change requests. As a requirements engineer, you will probably be most concerned with linking requirements to other requirements, and possibly to test cases. Other teams may link their artifacts to your requirements as well, depending on your organization's traceability needs. As with other common operations, you approach to linking depends on your basic approach to requirements: Document or tool-based. This topic points you to the features you need to link requirements for both approaches.

Linking in Documents

You can link the Work Items defined in a Document to other items in the same Document, in a different Document, or stored directly in the Tracker. See Linking a Document's Work Items.

Linking in the Work Item Editor

The table view of the Work Items topic, and the same view of a Document, provide an editor for Work Item data that you can use to link a requirement to any Work Item of any type. The link can be to Work Items in your project, or in another project. Linking to Work Items in a different repository is also possible, but that is an advanced issue, and is not needed for most requirements engineering projects.

The Linked Work Items section of the Work Item Editor provides a graphical interface for linking a selected requirement with another Work Item. A picker dialog box is available with integrated querying, including graphical query builder, that you can use to locate the target Work Item for the link.

To familiarize yourself with linking this way, see Linking Work Items.

See also: Linking via the Matrix View.