Associating test cases with requirements

In the application, you can associate test cases with requirements in the Requirements Management application. Then you can include the test cases in test plans to ensure thorough test coverage of product requirements.

About this task

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 or create a test case, and in the table of contents, click Requirement Links.
  2. Click the Add new links icon (Add). The Requirement Selection dialog box opens.
  3. Optional: If more than one artifact container is configured, after you click the Add new links icon (Add), the Artifact Container selection dialog box opens. Select the container that you want to connect and click OK. The Requirement Selection dialog box opens.
  4. The requirement projects are displayed. Select the requirement to associate with the test case. To select more than one requirement, press and hold the Ctrl key and select the requirements. You can link requirements and requirements within Modules to test cases:
    1. If you select Folders, the link is created with the base artifact.
    2. If you select Modules the link is created in the context of the module and not the base artifact.
  5. Click OK. The requirements are displayed in the Requirement Links section of the test case.
  6. Click Save to save the changes that you made to the test case.