In this blog, we recap our webinar, “Improve Traceability and Enhance Coverage with Live Trace Explorer™”

Improve Traceability and Enhance Coverage with Live Trace Explorer™

Engineering teams today face growing challenges in maintaining requirement coverage, managing risks, and making informed, data-driven decisions,  all while working with siloed tools and tight deadlines. Simply meeting the minimum traceability requirements isn’t enough to stay competitive.

Live Trace Explorer™ helps teams visualize end-to-end trace relationships, identify gaps, validate coverage, and ensure quality in real time. With advanced filtering capabilities, you can focus on what matters most to keep your projects on track, compliant, and aligned with traceability best practices.

In this session, host Francis Trudeau will show you how Live Trace Explorer enables engineering teams to visualize trace relationships, validate coverage, pinpoint gaps, and ensure quality, all in real-time. You’ll also learn how advanced filtering capabilities help you focus on what matters most, while aligning your traceability practices with industry best practices.

What You’ll Learn:

• The vision behind Live Trace Explorer and its evolution
• How to use filtering to enhance clarity, control, and support traceability best practices
• Strategies for leveraging traceability to manage risk and ensure compliance
• This is your chance to gain actionable insights, contribute to the evolution of traceability tools, and stay ahead in managing risk and compliance.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Francis Trudeau: My name is Francis Trudeau, and I’m a Product Manager at Jama Software. I’m also a curious Scout leader who thrives in the great outdoors and enjoys a good story. Now, picture me as a hiker standing at the foot of a mountain, and that mountain represents the path of development, the climb towards a vision that guides our every step. My specific role is to give you a clearer, elevated view, helping you navigate your projects from start to finish, measuring progress, and managing risks along the way. The summit of the mountain represents that ideal, managing the development process through data. In other words, making decisions based on available information, think metrics, graphics, trend lines, dashboards, etc. But like any true vision, it’s not just a destination. It’s a challenge. Can we even get there? Is there a taller peak hidden behind this one? That mystery is part of the adventure.

In today’s webinar, I invite you to tag along on this journey. I’ll show you the progress we’ve made so far, offer a glimpse of the path ahead and share how you can contribute to making this vision a reality. So we are set for a journey, and our first milestone along the way is the Live Trace Explorer, which is essentially a visual dynamic representation of the V-Model for evaluating coverage, addressing gaps and managing associated risks. Focusing on the diagram, each tile represents a component or set connected with trace paths. These paths are gray if there are no relationships between the items in adjacent tiles and they turn green and red to indicate the number of valid or suspect relationships between those tiles.

On the right side, the verifications and validations branch shows the number of test cases linked to items within the container on its left no matter where they appear in the project. At the bottom of each tile, you’ll find a metric representing the ratio of those test cases included in a test plan.

On the requirements side, the top part of each tile displays stats including the number of items by type and any open conversations. In the bottom half, you’ll find coverage metrics, essentially the ratio of existing relationships to expected ones as defined by the Traceability Information Model.

Overall, the Life Trace Explorer is meant to expose the coverage completeness as the ratio of existing over expected relationships and a measure of the validity of relationships by exposing a metric of suspect relationships between related items included in two adjacent tiles. By creating a diagram for a simple project, one can easily get a big picture of a project, spot gaps, and keep track of progress. Beautiful, isn’t it? Are we there yet?

Well, not quite. As we catch our breath and take in the view, it becomes clear that the view, while impressive, is a little foggy. We’ve reached a breathtaking lookout. The elevated view is structured, informative, even beautiful, but for many of the customers we’ve consulted, the information still feels cloudy. Yes, the coverage percentage and suspect indicators are valuable. They give us a sense of direction, but there’s a key limitation. The Life Trace Explorer currently measures everything without distinction. In real projects, not every item should count towards coverage. To get a metric that truly reflects reality, we need the ability to focus, to filter in only the relevant items and filter out the noise. Only then can we sharpen the view and get a clearer, more meaningful measure of completeness.

RELATED: Requirements Traceability Benchmark

Trudeau: Let’s take a look at a few real examples customers have shared with us. The first one is about filtering out items that shouldn’t be included in coverage. For instance, many teams keep items in their project that were originally considered but later rejected. They’re still useful for historical context, but they don’t need to be part of the coverage calculation. The same goes for draft items. They’re still in progress and not ready to be measured yet.

The second example is about narrowing the scope. Sometimes teams want to measure coverage or track suspect links only for a specific slice of the project. A good example is when using prioritization methods like MoSCoW, where a team may only want to focus on must-have items.

Another example is when tailoring views for different stakeholders, say admins, primary users, or partners, and only showing what’s relevant to each group. Now, Jama Connect^® is highly configurable, so these are just a few common examples. What matters here is that the filtering we’ve added to the Live Trace Explorer works with any picklist field and only picklists for now. So with that in mind, let’s jump into Jama Connect and see how it works.

Here we are in the ACME demo project. The Traceability Information Model or TIM flows simply from left to right, starting with higher-level needs, then moving down to requirements and designs. Each of these is validated and verified by test items. It’s a straightforward setup that follows the logic of the V-Model.

To begin, we’ll generate a diagram for the entire project and open the Trace Score™ calculator so we can keep track of the metrics used in the calculation. Our first filter will focus on the design items. Right now, we have three designs, and the coverage is showing 66%. Let’s take a closer look. In our project, each design has a status chosen from a picklist: draft under review, approved or rejected. One of them is currently marked as rejected. We’re going to apply a filter to ignore rejected designs. To do this, open the configuration settings, open the configuration applied to the specification tiles, click the funnel icon to set the filter, set the rule using the picklist field for design status, in the second drop-down choose is not equal to, then select rejected, set the filter, and apply. We now have two items instead of three. Coverage for the items that matter is 100%, and the Trace Score is updated accordingly. Also, notice the funnel icon. It shows that a filter is now applied to this item type in this tile.

Next, let’s move to the requirements. At ACME, we use the MoSCoW method to prioritize them. Suppose we want to focus only on the must-have items. We’d apply a similar filter as we did for designs. Here we have four requirement items, but only one is marked as must. Back in the diagram, we follow the same steps to set the filter. Before I hit apply, you can probably guess the item count will drop to one, but watch what happens with the suspect and coverage metrics. We now notice a clear coverage gap with the designs. On the verification side, test cases are linked, but they’re not included in a test plan yet. As for the suspects, there are three needs pointing to this must requirement, and one of those needs has changed, which makes the relationship suspect.

For our last example, let’s look at those needs. Each one is tagged with one or more user groups. Let’s say we only want to measure the needs relevant to partners. We go back to the configuration panel. Since this is a multi-select picklist, our rule options are contains and does not contain. We choose the content and select a partner. Before I hit apply, pay attention to the suspect links, the test metrics, and open conversations. See that all these related metrics are refreshed to only consider information from filtered items.

RELATED: Buyer’s Guide: Selecting a Requirements Management and Traceability Solution

Trudeau: To wrap up, this configured filtered diagram gives us a Trace Score specifically for the partner’s needs, focusing on must requirements and excluding rejected designs. Finally, we can save this configuration, for example, as ACME for Partner, so we can return to it later.

That was a quick tour of how Live Trace Explorer filtering works, a simple, flexible way to sharpen your focus and configure what you actually want to measure. Now let’s talk about what’s next. Filters will be available to all cloud customers in Jama Connect 9.24 scheduled for release in the coming weeks. In July, Live Trace Explorer will be part of our customer-validated cloud rollout, and note that this version is based on Jama Connect 9.22, so filters won’t be included in that CBC release. For self-hosted customers, Live Trace Explorer with filtering will be available later this fall. Our team remains fully dedicated to the future development of Live Trace Explorer, and this includes further refinements on filters, specifically developing nested filters, supporting and or clauses for more than one filtering rule. Remember in the demo when I excluded rejected designs, what if I wanted to exclude draft or rejected designs? The nested filters will allow for this sort of logic.

Beyond these near-term improvements, we are exploring ideas inspired by customer feedback, ways to make Live Trace Explorer even more configurable and actionable. Driving action is about clicking a metric to drill into a filtered trace view, showing only items with missing coverage, suspect links or open conversations. Tailoring is about tailoring the diagram layout itself, hiding irrelevant tiles or reordering them for clarity or to reveal suspect status between different locations. We’re also looking beyond the diagram towards future metrics that can help you manage your projects with confidence.

When the team brainstormed avenues for the Live Trace Explorer, many possible metrics were envisioned. Trend lines over time to tell the story of your project and identify bottlenecks. Coverage gaps per item owner to visualize specific user. What about an item status breakdown? Is this worth monitoring? And what do you think of the relationship health for visualizing change and rework? Is a measure of aging for suspects interesting? What about test execution status? Not just test coverage? These are just a few examples, and of course, we’re always looking for more ideas, but the metrics that really matter are the ones aligned with your goals. I guess the question is, what do you want to manage? What do you want to measure?

Jama Connect is already helping teams bridge requirements and testing, but we want to support you further with insights that reflect your priorities, your goals, and your way of working, so here’s my invitation. Join us in this journey. If the idea of managing the development process through data resonates with you, if you’re excited about defining and evolving the right metrics, if you want a map and compass of your mountain climb, a way to see not just where you are but where you’re going, then let’s keep the conversation going. Reach out to your customer success manager, ask to connect with product management, and help shape the future of Live Trace Explorer and the tools that power your work.

WATCH THE ENTIRE WEBINAR HERE:
Improve Traceability and Enhance Coverage with Live Trace Explorer™

Jama Connect Features in Five: Live Trace Explorer

Learn how you can supercharge your systems development process! In this blog series, we’re pulling back the curtains to give you a look at a few of Jama Connect’s powerful features… in under five minutes.

In this Features in Five video, Francis Trudeau, Product Manager at Jama Software, will introduce viewers to Jama Connect’s Live Trace Explorer, which auto-detects risk by bringing comprehensive and detailed insights into your complex development processes.

Please note that Live Trace Explorer is currently in beta and available for all Jama Connect Cloud customers to try.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Francis Trudeau: Hello and welcome to the segment of Features in Five. My name is Francis Trudeau, and I’m a Product Manager at Jama Software. This video is an overview of Jama Connect’s Live Trace Explorer feature. Note that Live Trace Explorer is currently in beta and available for all Cloud customers to try.

The Live Trace Explorer is like a real-time map of the V-model, helping you check coverage completeness and validity across your project. It actively tracks metrics to spot gaps and risks between engineering teams so you can address issues early. This leads to a smoother development process, higher quality products, and faster time to market. This capability is a significant step in our vision to provide metrics for managing the development process through data.

To enable the Live Trace Explorer, go to the Admin tab, navigate to the Details section, find the Live Trace Explorer line, click Configure, check the box, and save. Once enabled, the feature appears in Admin Project settings and is available for Organization and Project Admins.

RELATED: Best Practices Guide to Requirements & Requirements Management

Trudeau: If permission is granted by their admins, users with a creator license can fully utilize the feature to load and configure existing diagrams. Once enabled, the Live Trace Explorer can be launched by right-clicking a project component or set to create a focused diagram for the selected node or right-clicking the project route to generate a comprehensive diagram showing all components and sets in sequence from top to bottom.

The resulting diagram visually represents the V-model with stakeholder needs, system requirements, designs, and components on the left, and their associated verifications and validations on the right. Each tile represents a component or set connected by trace paths. These paths are gray if there are no relationships between items and adjacent tiles, or they turn green and red to indicate the number of healthy or suspect relationships between them.

On the right side, the Verifications and Validation branch shows the number of Test Cases linked to items within the container on the left, no matter where they appear in the project. At the bottom of each tile, you’ll find a metric representing the ratio of these Test Cases included in a Test Plan. On the requirements side, the top part of each tile displays stats, including the number of items by type and any open conversations.

RELATED: How to Achieve Live Traceability™ with Jira^® for Software Development Teams

Trudeau: In the bottom half, you’ll find coverage metrics, essentially the ratio of active relationships to expected ones as defined by the traceability information model. For example, the model indicates that each high-level requirement should have two relationships downstream. Out of my four high-level requirements, three are covered by validations, giving me 75% coverage. Two are related to mid-level requirements, resulting in a score of 50%. In the Actions menu, you can access configuration settings to customize what’s displayed and measured. You can globally turn off item types, exclude specific relationships from consideration, or you can configure each tile separately.

A common use case consists of configuring your diagram for disabling relationships you are not expected to have at an early stage of your project. Then you may want to disable lower-level requirement items and relationships pointing downstream to them. Once applied, the coverage and total score will update automatically. Make sure to save your diagram once you have configured it to your liking. Live Trace Explorer updates in real-time, so any changes to project data instantly affect the metrics. For example, I can address a gap by clicking on the incomplete coverage. This will open Trace View where I can then establish a relationship to a mid-level requirement. Back in Live Trace Explorer, the metrics and total score summarizing all coverage will be updated after a refresh. You can keep a record and share these metrics by exporting a diagram as a PDF from the Actions menu at the top.

If you’d like to learn more about how Jama Connect can optimize your product, software, and systems development processes, please visit our website at jamasoftware.com.

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Jama Connect Features in Five Video Series