This new integration provides the hardware teams with immediate visibility of changes to the functional specification, and it also makes meeting the traceability requirements of safety standard like DO-254 and ISO26262 much easier.
Commenting Janussz Kitel, DO-254 Program Manager at Aldec said, “Spec-TRACER has always provided a means of capturing a wide range of project artifacts from different sources, but this integration with IBM DOORS Next will allow for much closer collaboration between systems and hardware teams.
“It is important, especially for safety critical applications such as avionics, that change management processes are underpinned by traceability data.”
Spec-TRACER is able to not only capture IBM DOORS Next artifacts and traceability data, but it can also export the relationships between requirements and hardware design data back to DOORS, allowing systems engineers to monitor the requirements coverage status.
Other new features include the ability to force the same parser settings on to all Spec-TRACER users within a team (which helps boost the level of collaboration and team efficiency) and the ability to disable requirements coverage verification during the capture process.
According to Kitel, "“At the start of a project you will have requirements coming in from lots of sources and at different times, so you are likely to gets lots of warnings about non-existent relationships, missing attributes, duplicated elements, incorrect values and so on. Once you are confident that most of your requirements are in place and their relationships fairly well understood you can then re-enable requirements coverage verification.”
Spec-TRACER also has a reports designer to help prepare project documentation that can, with the launch of the 2020.3 release, now include IBM DOORS artifacts alongside other design, verification and traceability data.