Interface and Requirement Traceability

Abstract

System documentation, such as specifications, Interface Control Documents (ICD), Architectural Design Documents (ADD), Interface Design Documents (IDD), and test procedures, contains in one form or another the project related system or subsystem level requirements, including cross-references to higher and/or lower level system or subsystem requirements. In addition, test reports also include test results in the form of as-run test procedures, as well as cross-references to which requirements or interfaces were satisfied by which test. Maintaining cross-references between multiple levels of specifications, requirements, test procedures and interfaces, in addition to verifying that every change in a high-level document flows down to the appropriate lower level documentation, is always a time-consuming task throughout the lifetime of a project. The idea presented in this paper is to use a centralized set of databases to create the requirement and/-or interface sections in the main body of specifications, test procedures, test reports or any other system documentation. It is hereby possible to link and group all requirements to their higher level “parents” as well as to the lower level requirements derived from them. By having test procedures included in the databases as well, it is possible to use the test procedure section of the databases as an actual “red-line master” during a test, and the actual test results can be entered in the database in real-time. Then it is always possible to track the close-out status for every single requirement throughout the project, more or less in real-time. When a new revision of a document is to be released, export functions within the databases generate the required sections automatically so they can just be pasted into the remaining document without having to ensure that all changes to requirements or interfaces have been included. Using export functions, it is also possible to generate close-out reports, provide the detailed test step section for the delivery of the test procedures, as well as providing the as-run test steps for the test report. Using the sum of introduced tools, the time needed to maintain a consistent set of requirements, interfaces and test steps throughout the project is minimized as all information only needs to be maintained in one centralized set of databases and distributed from there to support any required documentation. Time usually spent in verifying that any update to, for example, a requirement is consistently applied throughout all project documentation is not needed as the export function ensures that every newly released document uses the same current set of data. SpaceOps 2006 Conference AIAA 2006-5877 Copyright © 2006 by SESS GbR. Published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc., with permission. SpaceOps 2006, Rome 2 6/1/2006 Systems Engineering Support Services