Enhancement of requirements traceability with state diagrams

Requirements traceability could help analyzing the impact and inconsistency among derived requirements or work products due to requirements changes. Typically, the requirements traceability matrix is used as a tool to facilitate managing requirements changes. This paper presents an approach to enhancing the traceability matrix with UML state diagrams to describe the traceability states of associated requirements or life-cycle work products so that we could know what events have occurred to which work products, and could define the activities as the pre or post condition for state transition. The approach would help increasing the efficiency of requirements change management process.