3 ways to enhance Project traceability using Links Explorer Traceability & Hierarchy

Comprehensive and reliable traceability is essential for any Project. Traceability helps ensure the alignment of the project tasks and deliverables with the business requirements. Tracking project tasks, subtasks, or bugs can be challenging, depending upon the complexity of your projects.

For example, one high-level Epic divides into several stories, or a high-level task divides into multiple subtasks. Now we all know that the only constant in a project is change. So, when a high-level Epic or task is changed, it is necessary to find all of the linked stories or bugs or tasks and subtasks to make sure they are not impacted. If you have only one linked story or subtask, this would be ok. But when there are tens and hundreds of stories or subtasks, it can become painful.

To overcome this challenge, we use traceability tools. Studies show that traceability tools can increase the speed of project development by 24% and the accuracy of a project by 50%. These tools allow you to decrease the number of bugs. Ensuring that the result of the product meets the requirements initially outlined.

In this article, we will discuss three key features available in Links Explorer Traceability & Hierarchy that can improve your Project Traceability in Jira.

3 ways to enhance Project traceability

While Jira can assist you in managing your projects effectively. Links Explorer is built for Jira users to assist them with advanced traceability. Links Explorer integrates seamlessly with JIRA, allowing you to track your epics, stories, requirements, tasks, etc in Jira. And it improves project traceability at every stage of the project. Here’s how you can enhance your project traceability using Links Explorer-

Transparency

The unified Tree view is one of the unique features of Links Explorer that provides a complete hierarchy of Jira issues and its related links in a single window. This centralized view highlights the Jira issue and its related artifacts (including Epics, tasks, sub-tasks, and Portfolio hierarchies) involved across projects.

The unified tree view also comes along with multiple filters (issue type, link type, direction) that can refine your search according to your requirement. This real-time information helps your team to visualize the complete progress of a particular epic, story, or task from a single window instead of switching to multiple tabs or windows.

Using this tree view, you can create better transparency between the team and stakeholders and ensure that the project is moving in the right direction.

Consolidated report

Creating a single consolidated system for data and decision is considered as one of the best practices for traceability. Using Links Explorer’s powerful traceability reports, you can follow this practice. Traceability reports generate end to end traceability between linked Jira issues across the project. These reports are available in an easy to comprehend tabular format.

Traceability is one of the most important aspects of meeting Compliance.  And without a proper traceability tool project managers fail consistently to meet compliance. The end to end Traceability reports in Links Explorer includes information on issue key, issue summary, issue links (Epic, Story, Task, Sub-task, or other issue link types) along with issue status and priority. These reports also come in handy with regular auditing and in meeting compliance regulations.

Analyze & Control

Another equally important practice is to control and protect projects from defects. Ensuring the project doesn’t overrun of time and budget. To achieve this, you need a tool that can help you control and monitor all changes. Interactive depth mode by Links Explorer you the necessary control.

The interactive Depth mode present with the unified tree view helps your team to analyze the impact of changes across the project at different levels. Irrespective of the complexity of the Epic, you can expand a high-level issue until it leads to an independent issue; this feature aids in measuring the magnitude of impact due to any change request.

Learning about project traceability and tools available for it is the first step towards ensuring transparency and accountability throughout the project development cycle.

What’s more important is how you as a project manager or product owner utilize these tools to improve product design, development, and deliverability.

If you’re looking for a comprehensive and reliable traceability tool for Jira, check out Links Explorer Traceability & Hierarchy and sign up for a free trial today.