Traceability from Business Requirements to Development Tasks (many-to-many relationship)

[Avigail Manheim]

Hi,

I am looking for advice about the best way to manage traceability from business (aka marketing) requirements to development tasks (aka product requirements). Currently, our business requirements are in Confluence, and our development requirements are in Jira in the form of epics, stories, and subtasks. The relationship between the business requirements and the dev requirements is many-to-many. (One epic can support multiple business requirements, and one business requirement may require multiple epics to be implemented.)

At one point we considered putting the business requirements themselves in Jira, but we were concerned that it would be more difficult to review - both because you need to open each issue to see the details instead of reading through a single page; and because we don't currently have an add-on that would allow us to easily see issues in a hierarchy view if we wanted to nest requirements. We briefly considered having the requirements duplicated in Confluence and Jira, but rejected that option as too likely for things to become out of sync and it undermines the idea of having single-source-of-truth.

Our best idea so far is to add Jira links to the relevant epics in-line next to each business requirement in Confluence. A requirement being edited in Confluence would prompt a review of the linked epics to determine if any changes are needed on the development side. This process requires a large time commitment - both for creating the initial linkages and later reviewing them - so before going down this road, I wanted to ask the community for your thoughts and insights:

How does your company successfully manage both marketing and development requirements and the traceability between them?

Keeping in mind that in our case the relationship is many-to-many so we can't just add the requirements as a layer above epics in Jira, is there a way to make this process less manual/require less bureaucracy?

[Rina Nir · Accepted solution]

Hello @Avigail Manheim ,

I am the product manager of Jira Snapshots for Confluence, and I would suggest you check it out. With this app, you can enter your business requirements in Jira without facing the two hurdles you mention:

1. You will still be able to review the requirements as a list in a single Confluence page: You'll create a Jira Snapshot report that will list all the requirements that are in scope for review. Moreover- because Snapshot has a DIFF view, reviewers can clearly see what has changed since the previous time they reviewed.
2. Jira Snapshots allows you to create hierarchical tables (traceability reports) in Confluence. So basically any hierarchy that can be expressed in Jira (for example- relying on link types) Can be used to build a hierarchical snapshot report in Confluence.
   
   I hope this helps, 
   If you do give it a try- I'd be happy to hear how it went,

Rina

[Avigail Manheim]

Hi @Rina Nir ,

I see that Jira Snapshots for Confluence allows you to create a table with multiple levels. Do these levels need to be a parent-child relationship (i.e. conform to the Jira hierarchy), or can they be any linkage (such as 'related to' or 'blocked by')? 

[Rina Nir]

@Avigail Manheim ,

They can follow any linkage relation. This includes custom link types.

Rina

[Sofia Kargioti _QC Analytics_]

Hey there👋

To whomever it may concern. If you're looking for an easier way to handle requirements traceability in Confluence Cloud, you might want to check out our QC Traceability app! It lets you link and track everything directly in Confluence, making the whole process super smooth and easy.

Providing both full project traceability and item lifecycle traceability it can prove to be a really useful tool for organizations.

Feel free to give it a try!😊

[Manuel]

Hi @Avigail Manheim ,

in theory, you can have many levels of "requirements". You can approach this in different ways. If you're using a test management tool, such as Xray, you can see if it provides visibility of this hierarchy of requirements... and if so, if you can take advantage of it.

There's a app for Confluence named Xray Reports for Confluence that can serve this purpose, if you're using Xray for Test Management.

This app allows you to embed testing reports, based on data from Xray Test Management, directly into your pages in Confluence. It provides several macros tailored for this, that allow you, for example, to track traceability.

It is a macro that provides preview on the results, before publishing the page, and allows interaction with the chart, for example to expand epics and see the related story issues.

To get it working, you'll need to follow these steps, which require installing not just this app on Confluence but also a "Connector" app in your Jira instance:

1. install the Xray Reports Connector for Jira app on your Jira cloud instance
2. install the Xray Reports app in your Confluence cloud instance
3. configure the Xray API client id and client secret on the settings of the Xray Reports for Confluence app; you need to obtain the client id and client secret from your Xray API Key settings, in your Jira cloud instance

More info on the installation steps here.