Widget for Polarion: Improve your traceability
One of the strengths of Polarion is link tracking and traceability. There are already multiple options available to include this in reports. Last month we had a deeper look into coverage for Test Cases. This month we take a closer look at coverage in general.
Blog by Martin Bron
Preamble
One of the strengths of Polarion is tracking and following the links. There are already multiple options available to bring this into reports. Last month we had a deeper look into coverage for Test Cases. This month we take a closer look at coverage in general.
There are already different options available for coverage. Some are paid like Powersheet and Risksheet from Nextedy. Others are free available on the extensions portal like the multilevel traceability table.
For whom this could be interesting
Difference from other solutions?
Just like the multilevel traceability table, it can generate an overview for links over multiple levels, edit Work Items by selecting the line, and similar configuration options. The biggest difference is that the InnoFour solution displays the links more in a tree view (like in the standard traceability table of Polarion) and not with a lot of columns. But there is more. A check can be made to make it easier visible if a link is there or missing:
It is also possible to select different views for different types of reporting. Like displaying only the Work items that have missing links:
Or display only the ones that do have a link:
Or display only certain Work Item Type(s) to generate a list of specific Work Items that are somewhere when following the links:
Or you don't want to have large tables because scrolling through hunderds or thousands of lines to see if everything is correct is simply too time consumng. There is also an optionn to display it as an overview complete with percentage to use as KPI.
Here every number displayed is also a hyperlink to view the Work items in a table view.
Checks performed on the links
Just like the multilevel traceability table, the check can be performed on the link type, link direction, and Work Item type. Or a combination of these. For checking if the item is covered, it is possible to configure it that it needs multiple links (each configured separately) (what makes checking the full coverage for a higher level, lower level and test case possible) and/or separate links (like a System Requirements needs to have at least one link with a Software, Mechanical OR Electrical Requirement). This provides an extra dimension on checking for coverage that isn’t provided in an easy overview with the other options.
Word from our developer
The initial version of this widget is created before the multilevel traceability table was available in the extensions portal. I have based it mainly on the standard traceability table of Polarion. But included very early an overview to stop scrolling through large tables. This was always the biggest and best benefit of this widget compared to other options. And because of using it over multiple years, I have also started abusing it to generate lists of linked items that where buried deep in links. Especially when due to different paths, it could be that the paths had different lengths. It became possible with the new query options in 2506, but here it is without a complex query.