Linking to requirement collections

You can ensure that your testing effort adequately covers the requirements by linking requirement collections, modules, and saved module views to your test plans. Later, you can assign each requirement to a test case and link to the test case from the test plan to ensure that the requirements have complete testing coverage.

About this task

You must configure the integration between the test project area and the requirements project area before you can create the link to the requirements collection. See Running the setup wizard for details.
Limitations: If you do not enable configuration management, when you create a link to external artifacts in the Engineering Lifecycle Management application, a link is automatically created back to the source artifact, which is called a back link. However, the synchronization between bidirectional links and the traceability between source and target artifacts might be unavailable depending on certain transactional operations in the source or target application.
Learn more about bi-directional links:

When you can navigate from the target of a link back to the source of the link, this is known as bidirectional linking.

If the configuration management is enabled in the Quality Management project, the links are stored in the source artifact repository and back-links are discovered by the target artifact server making queries on the source artifact servers or LDX.

If configuration management is not enabled, the source and target applications store their links in separate databases, and the source application does not have access to the database in the target application. Certain transactional operations, such as when artifacts are copied or deleted, can occur on the source application server. In these cases, corresponding back links in artifacts in the target application are not automatically added or removed. Also, instances occur where back links are intentionally removed from the target application without removing the corresponding link from the source application. As a result, if bidirectional links are not in a state of synchronization, traceability between the source and target artifacts can appear different based on your starting viewpoint.

To add or remove target artifact links to or from the source artifact, you do not need permission to save the target artifacts.

Procedure

  1. Open a test plan or create a new one.
  2. Add the Requirement Collection Links section to the test plan if it is not already included.
    1. Click Manage Sections.
    2. Select Show all sections to display all of the available sections.
    3. In the Available Sections list, select Requirement Collection Links and move the item to the Selected Sections list by clicking the Add Add icon.
      Note: The Add Add icon is available in the General View. If you have set the View As to Coverage, the Add icon is not visible.
    4. Click OK to close the Manage Sections window.
    Note: Test artifacts can also be linked to requirement artifacts by using the copy-and-paste or drag-and-drop method. For more information, see Linking test artifacts to requirements and development artifacts by using the copy-and-paste method and Linking test artifacts to requirements and development artifacts by using the drag-and-drop method.