Imagine you are about to deploy a business critical application to the production environment or deliver a project to your customer and your product testing or quality assurance team suddenly notifies you of a showstopper in one of the areas of the product. This probably calls for either modifying the database or adding new business logic or modifying the UI. What more ? Look for an excuse to apprise the end users that there is a delay in the launch date. Where do you begin? Is there an on-spot visibility into this sudden challenge? Did you miss something in your planning to meet the delivery schedule and hand over an application that does what it was supposed to do?

You probably hit this tight bend for two reasons: You don’t have the right visibility into project execution or evenif you have, you cant conduct a traceability analysis -- a very valuable but seldom used technique in today’s development processes.

Project Managers would argue that it takes extra time and effort to keep up with the requirement's traceability, as well as increased maintenance effort in a system that evolves through numerous changes for future releases. Whether this is a real or perceived negative is up to the project team to debate on, the effort to perform traceability is not negative if the information captured is used in the future to save the time and effort. The truth is that this perceived negativity means costly rework and schedule slippage.

Traceability in Digité Enterprise has been designed keeping in mind its importance and challenges a project manager faces despite his best intent. Every requirement agreed upon before and during the development of an application should have something designed or delivered to satisfy that requirement. Digité Enterprise traceability offers considerable benefits for your project:

• Requirements Specifications, statements of work, or informal discussions/communications frequently have requirements outlined as a set of obligations to your customer. A good traceability avoids a breach of the customer agreement.

• Good Traceability also helps coming up with the best of the designs and deliver a quality solution once your architect has the complete information to design.

• By appropriately tracing your requirements to designs and test cases, you can immediately determine what has to be revisited up the traceability tree as a result of change requests and thereby attaining a better change management process. In the process your configuration management also becomes much more robust and easier to maintain.

• A simple traceability report saves a project by unearthing potential problems early in the development cycle and minimizes the time and money spent on reworks. With Digité Enterprise Traceability feature, one can verify that all requirements have been satisfied. You are no more expected to remember everything the client or the end-user wants.

All these benefits ultimately result in shorter development cycles and more on-time deliveries. Last but not the least, you build credibility with your end users by giving them the targeted & verifiable information if something hits a tight bend. They will trust you when you assert that it would just take 4 days to fix this glitch.