Traceability Templates

SECollab allows to create Traceability templates. Traceability templates are a way to define traceability link import configuration from Excel. Once defined, the team project leader can rely on to import a complete set of links from Excel file.

Creating a Traceability Template

To create Traceability Templates, go to the Project Administration's "Traceability templates" section:

• Click the "+ New traceability template" link
• Set a title, and optionally a description
• Set a UID (Unique Identifier) delimiter. The UID delimiter is the character used in a Excel cell to separate several target identifiers.

You can then create sections:

• Click the "+" action icon on the template line
• Set a title, and optionally a description
• Set the name of the concerned section/sheet in the file to import
• Set the supported links list of the sheet in the file to import. Those links are checked and deleted when doing a full replacement of traceability.
• For both source and target, select the tool, design, root container and UID attributes

Traceability Excel File Format

Traceability Excel file is supporting *.xls and *.xlsx formats. Following constraints are expected:

• Each excel sheet of the Excel file stands for a couple Source Design/Target Designs.
• An Excel file can contain multiple Excel sheets
• To successfully create a link, the user MUST create a tuple with the following informations
• a functional id of the source resource belonging to the Source Design by selecting an attribute
• a functional id of the target resource belonging to the Target Design by selecting an attribute
• a link name (and not the title). The link name must exist in the project configuration.
• In the Excel file, a target cell can list multiple target ids separated by a special character (specified as delimiter character in the traceability template if different than ",")
• The first row of each sheet is considered as an informational header and is ignored when importing
• A source without target is supported for the "full replacement" mode, any supported link will be deleted from this source in that case

Importing Traceability file from Excel

The traceability import activity is available for a publisher or a project leader from the “Designs” screen.

A modal dialog allows the user to upload an Excel file and select a traceability template.

A 'Cancel and Replace existing links' option allows to achieve a full replacement of all existing links (in the configuration). Any existing "Supported Link" specified in the traceability template is removed from the source and its backlink (if any) from the target.

Import Activity Logs

When the import is achieved, imported links are controlled against the template definition and any activity traced in the Activity report including:

• Excel file name
• Execution timestamp
• For each excel sheet:
• execution time for each named sheet
• number of created/ignored links for earch named sheet
• any error creation log like:
• An invalid link name will be rejected
• Not existing source and target resources (from the UIDs in the Excel sheet) are logged as error if not found in the input designs for the configuration
• Any unexpected link creation/deletion errors during the update operation is logged
• Total execution time
• Total created, ignored, deleted links