Learn How Links Explorer Can Simplify Traceability Of Issues Within Jira

Traceability And Its Importance

Traceability refers to the capacity to record and trace a workflow from a finished part to its corresponding entities and vice versa. Traceability is applicable in industries like supply chain, software development, healthcare, and security.

According to A Guide to the Business Analyst’s Body of Knowledge, “the goal of tracing is to ensure that requirements are linked back to a business objective”. 

Traceability also plays a major role in any development lifecycle. It saves time, effort, and money on part of developers, business analysts, and project managers by avoiding backtracking, duplicate work, or missing out on any task.

Moreover, traceability when executed effectively, allows stakeholders to track the progress of projects, estimate project deliverables, and analyze the impact due to any change request.

Challenges with Jira

Jira by Atlassian has become a popular workflow engine that allows Agile teams to track issues or tasks through predefined and customized workflows.

One of the key variables that the Agile team needs to take into account is traceability. Although Jira has major features designed particularly for agile, including Scrum or Kanban, it doesn’t support the following features-

1. Many product development teams reach a moment when they realize what they’re creating has become so complex that performing traceability manually is no longer feasible.  Tracing these issues becomes not only labor-intensive but also prone to errors. However even while your teams are working in Jira, dependencies are not automatically tracked and visualized. Jira doesn’t support hierarchical visualization based upon relations. 
2. For projects having thousands of interdependent issues with many stakeholders involved, impact analysis becomes very complicated. Tracing change requests and calculating the impact of each change on the overall progress of the project is essential in order to avoid project failure and budget overrun.
3. Though Jira provides various reports on issue analysis, forecast & management, traceability reports are not available in Jira. These reports generate end to end traceability of linked issues across projects. Traceability reports can be used for documenting the full progress of the project and can save huge time during audits.

Here’s How Links Explorer Is Solving These Challenges

Well, you’ll be happy to know Links Explorer addresses the above features and provides seamless traceability of issues within Jira. It is an excellent enhancement application over traditional Jira. And allows you to trace, analyze, and report the progress of linked Jira issues, Epics, and Portfolio hierarchies dynamically.

Unified Tree View

Links Explorer displays the complete hierarchy of linked Jira issues in a single space. Such unified visualization makes it easier for users to plan the best course of action and keeps everyone in sync by providing information about issue status, priority, issue type, and issue link type.

Impact Analysis

Any changes done in Jira will be immediately reflected in the unified tree view of Links Explorer. The interactive Depth mode in Links Explorer helps you to analyze the impact of changes on other interdependent issues. Thus, it reduces potential risks and delays.

Powerful Traceability Reports

Links Explorer provides a powerful traceability report that can generate end to end traceability displaying linked issues across the project.

You can also generate reports displaying issues linked in hierarchical format for a particular version or saved filters in Jira. These reports provide detailed information on issue type, issue linked type, status, priority, issue key, and summary.

From allowing your team to visualize, track, analyze, and report the progress of linked Jira issues, Links Explorer helps to enhance the user experience.

Learn more about how Agile teams use Links Explorer Traceability & Hierarchy to improve their Agile capabilities.