The Trouble with Traceability

I've taken many of my thoughts from my previous blog-entries on traceability and expounded & expanded upon them in my May 2005 "Agile SCM" column of CMCrossroads Journal. The article is entitled The Trouble with Tracing: Traceability Dissected. It describes:

• Ten Commandments of Traceability
• Nine Complaints against Traceability
• Eight Reasons for Traceability
• The Seven Functions of SCM:
  
• The Six Facets of Traceability
  
• The Five Orders of Traceability
• The Four Rings of Stakeholder Visibility
  
• Three Driving Forces for Traceability
  
• Two Overarching Objectives: Transparency & Identification
• One Ultimate Mission: Fostering a Community of Trust
  

On a separate note ... I recently realized that the order/date on which I first author my blog-entries has been very different than the published date of the entry. I was saving them, but not publishing them.

Normally I may take a day or two to "clean-up" an entry (add the URLs, fix the formatting and fight with the WYSIWYG blog-composer) and publish them within a couple days of creating them. But we had a grave illness (and then death) in my family that consumed most of May for us, and I didnt realize until recently that my blog-entries for the last half of April and most of May hadnt been published yet.

So for that I must apologize. And I'll try to do better about publishing more regularly (ideally at least weekly).