Key Traceability Challenges

Establishing traceability is critical for many organizations — and a must for those who need to prove compliance. That’s why you need traceability solutions from Perforce.

Jump to the solution for your challenge.

Tracking Requirements, Tests, and Bugs

You need to be able to definitively answer:

  • Were the requirements met?
  • Which tests were run?
  • Who ran these tests and where?
  • What was the status of each of these tests?
  • What was the coverage generated by these tests?
  • Were defects resolved?

Manually tracking down these answers is time-consuming and difficult. To truly ensure traceability, you need to automatically track objects — requirements, tests, defects, etc. — throughout design and development.

Semiconductor Design Verification

For semiconductor designs, verification requires more than traditional test and regression runs. You might run:

  • Formal verification tools.
  • Hardware / software co-simulation.
  • AI-based multi-run debug methods.

This adds to the complexity of development. So does geography. Verification is often split across geographies, across on-premises and cloud compute farms, and across teams using hardware acceleration.

Collecting and analyzing data for traceability is a challenge. Yet, you must do it to meet compliance requirements in industries like automotive, aerospace and defense, and medical devices.

Traceability Solution: Requirements, Tests, and Bugs

Helix ALM is a powerful, modern application lifecycle management solution that simplifies end-to-end traceability of your entire development process.

This modular suite of ALM tools — Helix RM, Helix TCM, and Helix IM — lets you manage requirements, tests, and issues all in one spot. It also integrates with popular tools like Jira, so you can choose the modules you need to get end-to-end traceability with the software your team already uses.

Link Requirements

Helix ALM builds development relationships by linking requirements together and connecting test cases, test results, and even source code (in Helix Core) to provide upstream and downstream traceability of development artifacts.

Link Requirements
Automate Your Trace Matrix

Automate Your Trace Matrix

With automatic traceability, you can generate a trace matrix in seconds and get up-to-the-minute traceability reports in a few clicks. Artifact traceability is scalable, and perfect for companies developing complex, high-quality products.

The solution supports all product development methodologies, enterprise organizations, and development within regulated industries. No matter your product, you can achieve compliance and risk management more easily with Helix ALM.

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Automates requirements traceability, including traceability matrices.

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Automates design verification traceability, including dashboards.

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Links code to Helix ALM requirements or IP in Methodics IPLM.

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Design Verification

Helix IPLM provides a platform for end-to-end verification traceability for your designs.

Manage Designs as IPs

You can use Helix IPLM (formerly Methodics IPLM) to manage designs as a collection of IPs. Each logical design block can be treated as a potentially reusable IP — even if the block is not intended to be an IP in the traditional sense.

By modeling each block in the system using Helix IPLM’s enhanced IP model, every block is automatically tracked every time it is used in any chip or project. This is true for:

  • Foundation blocks used across several projects.
  • Highly specialized blocks that are custom built for a single project.

Helix IPLM is deeply integrated with Helix Core, the industry standard for data management. Helix Core allows you to manage source code and digital assets for your designs, too.

Manage Designs as IPs
Track IP in Workspace

Track IP in Workspaces

Helix IPLM builds and manages workspaces across users and projects. Every IP in the system is created in one or more workspaces.

Workspaces can be created for individual designers debugging an IP. Or they’re created by workflows running advanced simulations and test methodologies at subsystem and project levels.

Under all these conditions, across all platforms, Helix IPLM keeps track of which version of which IP was created in which workspace and by whom.

You can use Helix IPLM as a single, unified location to annotate results when you run verification. So, you get a single source of truth. Every verification is collated and visible on the IPs and IP versions. And everyone who needs it can find complete, traceable information in one location.

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Get Started With Helix IPLM

See for yourself why Helix IPLM is your best traceability solution for design verification. Talk to an expert to learn more.

Try Helix ALM

Find out why Helix ALM is the best requirements traceability solution.

Try Helix Core

Learn how Helix Core helps with traceability for source code and digital assets.