Successful Deployment of Requirements Traceability in a Commercial Engineering Organization...Really

Within the world of requirements engineering, it seems a foregone conclusion that traceability is vital to the product development process. Simultaneously, it appears that any implementation of traceability is doomed to failure. This paper examines a commercial engineering company´s use of traceability and the reasons why traceability is providing value despite the many challenges it presents. It describes the solution that was deployed and analyzes what has and has not succeeded, factors which should be common to any organization attempting to use requirements traceability.