Traceability Browser

Watch a video on the traceability browser here.

What is Traceability Browser?

In codeBeamer, a Traceability Browser is essentially a table that correlates any number of sets of any trackers or tracker types in a desired order and visualizes the dependencies (associations and/or relations) between the items corresponding the neighbouring selected trackers or tracker types. The first column contains always the items of the current tracker (optionally filtered by any view), the other columns contain the items having the specified tracker or tracker type which have dependency to the current item of the previous column. If tracker type is selected, this functionality is project independent, the items (and the dependencies) is shown from any project assigned to the current user.

Structure and usage of the Traceability Browser

You can navigate to the Traceability Browser from any tracker item list page using the view context menu on the top right of the tracker header or the more▼ menu on the action bar below the header. Or you can reach Traceability Browser directly from Trackers page, in this case firstly you have to choose initial tracker.

In the action bar you can find the following settings (the default settings will be configurable in Configuration panel):

• Associations: the whole traceability table will show the incoming and/or outgoing associations between tracker items.
• Relations: the whole traceability table will show the incoming and/or outgoing relations between tracker items.
• Exclude folders and information: "Folder" or "Information" category meaning type tracker items will exclude from the table result.

Current selection

On the left side top you can see the „Current selection” section, this shows the current tracker (from where you navigated to the Traceability Browser). You can change the current tracker by clicking the change button next to the tracker name. The items of the current tracker will be shown in the first column of the traceability table. You can filter by the tracker’s predefined views or custom table views using the dropdown (the current view will be preselected here).

Suggested trackers

In this section you can see the trackers which should be in relation with the current tracker. If Drag&Drop controls is disabled, you can see here also all the tracker types and the trackers of the current project. After displaying the traceability table, suggested trackers regarding of the tracker (or type) of the last coloumn will also display, sou it is able to extend the table by one click. It is able to add custom tracker to the Current selection list, if you cannot find it in the suggested tracker area. Clicking Add custom tracker will display a dialog, in which you can select any tracker from any project.

Configuration

You can change Traceability Browser settings by clicking the configure sign next to the Current selection header. The displaying overlay contains the following settings:

• Drag&Drop controls: if trackers will sho on the left area to be able to drag and drop trackers to the Current selection area. This setting is disabled by default, so in this case you can use only the Suggested trackers area.
• Type of dependecies: set here the default type of dependecies (incoming/outgoing Associations/Relations).
• Tracker types: select which tracker type(s) should appear in the available trackers and suggested trackers section.
• Other settings: if show hidden trackers also in the tracker selector list, and set here the default Exclude folder and information setting.
  
  

Tracker types

If you enable Drag&Drop controls, below the Current selection section you can see the available trackers (tracker types and trackers of the currect project with highlight), from this list you can Drag&Drop the desired trackers in the desired order into the Current selection section. You can Drag&Drop one tracker more times also. You can also change the order of the dropped tracker types. If you dropped the desired trackers to the Current selection, clicking the Show dependencies button will show you the traceability table.

The table

The traceability table contains the selected items, the first column contains the items of the current tracker (or filtered by any view), the other columns the depended items which have the selected tracker. Every item has three parts: the first subcolumn shows the project code and the tracker code, this is also a hyperlink pointing to the item’s details page. The second subcolumn is the title of the item, and the third shows the current status. Next to the table you can find the Suggested tracker section, so you can extend the table with other trackers / tracker types by one click.

Type of dependencies

Between two columns, if the first item has incoming/outgoing dependency(ies), there is a small icon which shows the type of the dependency:

• association
• relation

Suspected links

Just like the Traceability Matrix, the Traceability Browser also shows the suspected links, displaying an icon behind the item’s title. There are two types of such links:

• association type is: „copy of”
• association type is: „depends on”

Permanent Link

Once you select some trackers or tracker types into the Current selection section, and the dependencies are shown in the result table, you can make a permanent link of the result table. Click on the Permanent Link text on the action bar, the page will be reloaded with the previous result, the URL will be changed, so you can copy and use the URL which will contain the configurations you set.

Load/Store Presets

Project admins are able to store configuration presets in project level. The presets contains the current initial tracker (optionally filtered by view), the Current selection list, the Association/Relation settings (incoming/outgoing) and the Exclude folder and information setting.

Click Save current Settings on the action bar to store current configuration as a preset. You have to type a unique name of the preset and click Save. You will notified about the preset is managed to store or not.

Click Load/Manage Presets on the action bar to see the already stored Traceability Browser presets:

You will see the names and the selection list of the stored presets. If you are a Project admin, you can also Delete the stored Preset, in other cases you are able to load them.

Export to Office

There is ability to export the displayed table into MS Office by clicking the Export to Office link above and under the traceability table, so you can work with the traceability data further on.

• Excel export:Export the result table into Excel (xls format).
• Word export:Export the result into Word (docx format), building a tree inside the document containing the tracker items of the traceability result with detailed item information. You can specify also templates for the import, so you can configure which data of the tracker item should display. You can find more details about Word templates here: Word Templates in CB 7.2 - 9.2.