Where did that come from? Adding Traceability into your Product Development Process

Everyday Appfire helps our customers leverage Atlassian's tools to build better product. But how are these tools actually helping?

A few weeks ago I discussed the value of transparency and how Atlassian’s tools help to promote this core collaborative behavior within organizations. Another way is by adding "traceability" into your product development process.

Avoiding Process Failures

A common question that many of our new customers have a difficult time answering is:

"Where did that feature (or functionality, or business rule) come from?"

The inability to link key information (or artifacts) used in the development of your products almost always results in failure down the road. This failure can manifest itself in many different ways:

• It often effects development teams, with engineers wasting time developing incorrect features due to misunderstandings.
• It can quickly strike quality organizations, resulting in improper testing.
• The deployment or transport of products can become overcomplicated.
• It can present itself within product documentation, creating installation or configuration issues for customers.
• It can also make it difficult for support teams to effectively troubleshoot issues with customers.

Without effective traceability, product teams tend to spend more cycles in order to deliver results with less quality. Many organization often make the problem worse by rushing to implement quick fixes for products or features in order to "resovle" reported defects. However without effective traceability, these "fixes" are often unnatural and tend to improperly diverge from the product's intended architecture.

Compliance Benefits

Many of Appfire's customers participate in frequent audits in order to maintain their necessary compliance levels. During audits, these organizations are routinely asked to produce artifacts that show complete ancestry - from original inception/elaboration of features, down to the actual maintenance window requests to install the new product within their production environment. For many organizations, it can take weeks in order to satisfy just a single request.

It honestly doesn't have to be that difficult.

With Atlassian's tools, this work is made simple. Why? Well, because traceability is inherent within their products.

Here's a quick diagram to help illustrate:

If you want to help your organization become more efficient, start today by adding effective traceability into your product development process!