Stay on Top of Your Requirements Priorities: Track Them in Confluence

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When you’re managing requirements, there are always lots of moving pieces to keep track of, and overlooking one could derail your entire project. Failure to meet compliance standards, costly rework, scope creep, and miscommunications are often the result of improper requirements tracking. 

To effectively ensure quality, control costs, manage changes, and improve stakeholder visibility, a requirements tracking system is key. For agile teams using Atlassian software, the best place to track requirements is where the teams work, in Confluence and Jira. 

Here are two ways you can do this: 

1. Create requirements in Confluence and set up a traceability matrix using native features.
2. Use an app to automate the process, track test results, and export reports from the traceability matrix to share with stakeholders who aren’t using Jira. 

Businesses working with smaller projects may find the first method sufficient. It’s easy to set up and manage if your requirements are not too long or multi-layered. Large businesses with thousands of requirements and complex hierarchies will struggle to keep track of them in a basic table and should consider an app (Note: We’re from Requirement Yogi).

We’ll show you how to get started with documenting your requirements in Confluence and how to use the two methods.

Document Your Requirements in Confluence with Links to Relevant Jira Issues

To get started with managing your requirements, it’s best to put them in Confluence if you’re not already doing so. Confluence provides templates like this for writing requirements that also allow you to include links to Jira issues. That way, Confluence is your base so all the requirements are in one place, and you know which issues are connected to them and see their status.

Caption: This is an example of a Confluence requirements management template. (Source: Atlassian)

Another benefit of using Confluence for your requirements is having a permanent record for reference. As teams and projects change, it’s easy for Jira issues to get lost. A new team member may see a Jira issue in the backlog and delete it as old or irrelevant. If all the requirements are listed in Confluence, anyone can look back and see the big picture.

Create a Traceability Matrix in Confluence Using Native Jira and Confluence Features

Businesses working with smaller projects may track requirements using a simple table in Confluence. This includes just two columns; one for high-level requirements and another for the related Jira issues. While it does show the status of related issues, this solution is too basic for those managing complex requirements.

This solution works well for quickly viewing which issues are linked to high-level requirements and keeping track of their status. However, it’s not enough for businesses dealing with requirements on a larger scale.

Use an App to Track All Levels of the Process

Businesses with lengthy documentation, multiple projects and versions, and strict compliance standards benefit from choosing an app to ensure requirements are managed properly and efficiently. For example, with Requirement Yogi, you can automatically transform the requirements you’ve written in Confluence into a customizable traceability matrix that reflects any data you want to report on, so you can manage dependencies, compare versions, document test results, and provide greater visibility to stakeholders.

Below is an example of a matrix to track the progress of a project based on dependencies, priority, and the status of the Jira issues related to it. 

Caption: Here’s an example of a traceability matrix created in Requirement Yogi.

Requirement Yogi also integrates with Xray and Zephyr to show your test results directly in the traceability matrix. And if you need to share the matrix with stakeholders who aren’t on Jira or Confluence, it’s easy to export it to a pdf or spreadsheet.

Tracking requirements in Confluence is the best option for teams working in Jira and Confluence to stay aligned on priorities. Small teams might be able to get by with native features, but we recommend considering an app for full traceability of complex projects.