Traceability With Just 2 Clicks

Fundamentally, engineers need to know what to build, how to build it, and later check how good it was built. In other words, engineers need to describe requirements, implement a solution, and perform tests. Furthermore, engineers need to know how each requirement was implemented and how each requirement was tested. This is also called traceability. While engineers have powerful software applications at their disposal to manage individual engineering aspects such as requirements, tests, and software code, they have very poor solutions to achieve traceability.

Existing traceability solutions are either difficult to use or incapable of scaling

I’ve spent the last twenty years of my life trying to help engineers connect their data across different software applications. I’ve seen many different solutions, and I’ve implemented several myself. The harsh reality is that none of the existing solutions are good enough. Either the user experience for engineers is terrible, or the approach cannot be applicable to enough applications.

Luckily, as is often the case, challenges can be overcome with new technology. Even though software applications to manage requirements, tests, and software are not designed to be interoperable, they have one thing in common: they are all accessed through a Web browser. It would be a shame not to take advantage of that. Web browsers have something powerful called extensions, which can augment existing Web pages and Web applications. The most popular Web browser extensions are used to block ads (e.g. AdBlock Plus), save passwords securely (1Password), check spelling (e.g. Grammarly), invert the color scheme of web pages to reduce eye strain (e.g. Dark Reader), and more. Why not use Web browser extensions to help engineers manage cross-domain aspects such as traceability?

TraceLynx augments your web browser with traceability features

Our solution TraceLynx uses a Web browser extension to provide a new in-app user experience such that engineers can have additional traceability features within their favorite software applications. With one click, they can select an information item as a link source in one app, and with just another click, they can select another information item as a link target in another app.

Example of additional traceability features in Jira

Example of additional traceability features in Gitlab

Once a link has been created, items with a link are marked with a little chain icon next to them, which when clicked, allows the engineer to navigate to the linked item, by opening another browser tab and showing the linked item within its native application. We call these features Quick Link and Quick Nav.

Demo video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/RBas3YSSrnE

You can also see the more traditional picker dialogs to select link targets within other demo videos on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TraceLynx.

Overall, TraceLynx enables the user to:

• Create traceability links within your familiar apps
• Create links between information items from different apps in seconds
• Visualize information items to be connected with their full contextual information inside their native applications
• Navigate seamlessly between linked information items from different apps
• Have a common user experience for traceability management across different apps

And TraceLynx avoids the following problems that are common with alternative solutions:

• No need to learn a new traceability app
• No need for data duplication, thus no complicated data syncing, thus no need to configure data exporters, and data importers, thus no need to have programming skills
• No need to define traceability links in a 3rd party app like Excel between outdated information items which are out-of-context
• No need to remember hacks of different point-to-point integrations

We use Web browsers daily to navigate between linked Web pages. Now we can use a Web browser extension to navigate between linked information items.

If you’re excited about the new traceability possibilities for engineers enabled by a Web browser extension, contact us and tell us about your traceability use case!
Contact us

You can follow our progress on our LinkedIn page, and on our YouTube channel.

Link to TraceLynx Website: https://tracelynx.com
Link to TraceLynx blog: https://tracelynx.com/blog/