Bulk Import of Requirements Test Step Traceability for Mission Systems

October 18th, 2018 by inflectra

traceability rapise requirements excel import

One of the unique needs when designing and developing mission systems for the defense industry, is the fact that you need to be able to trace system requirements to individual test steps in a test case. Based on this advice we received from industry subject matter experts, we added support in SpiraTeam v5 for this feature. However one limitation was that the data migration tools we have for loading data from Excel into SpiraTeam don't let you add requirement - test step links in bulk... until today.

Background

When designing and developing mission systems for the Defense industry, you need to show traceability for the individual test steps being executed, back to the underlying requirements. This is in contrast to other types of system, where traceability between the requirements and the overall test case is usually sufficient.

To address this specific need, we added support for linking test steps to requirements.  However our current Excel Add-In for importing requirements and test cases into Spira, only supports linking the requirements to test cases, not individual test steps. So you had to associate everything inside the UI, which could be laborious if you were loading in existing tests and requirements from Excel.

Using Rapise to Import Test Step Traceability

So, to give you a way to load in your requirements - test step association in bulk, we used our own tools - Rapise and SpiraTeam to provide a solution for loading in your requirements and test step associations:

 

The pre-built Rapise sample project includes an Excel spreadsheet template that you can populate with your list of requirements IDs and test steps IDs. Then when you click the Execute button in Rapise, it will loop through all of the items, and call the SpiraTeam REST API to load in the data:

then once the data has all been loaded successfully, the requirements - test step associations will be loaded into SpiraTeam for you:

Running a Report of the Test Step Traceability

Once you have loaded in the traceability associations between your requirements and test steps, you can then use a custom report to display the requirements - test case - test step traceability in an easily digestible format:

Using Rapise to Automate Spira REST API

One of the interesting features of this solution is that it also demonstrates how you can use Rapise and Excel to automate the SpiraTeam REST API and use it to read/write data to/from an Spreadsheet. It could be extended to easily load other types of data into SpiraTeam from Excel (or other systems) in a more flexible way than is possible using our Excel Add-In.

Further Reading

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