Requirements traceability (RT) can be viewed as “the ability to describe and follow the life of a requirement, in both the forward and backward direction” It is used to capture the relationships between requirements, design, and implementation of a system. RT not only can be a useful solution to align system evolution with changing stakeholder needs but also helps in finding unexpected problems, innovative opportunities and laying the groundwork for corporate knowledge management

Techniques have been suggested in the research literature to address the RT problem. Their use, however, is still not as widespread as the importance of RT suggests. This is likely because there are still many issues to be addressed, for example, the lack of common definitions and conflicting underlying problems

According to analysis, there are two different kinds of traceability: prerequirements specification (pre-RS) traceability and postrequirements specification (post-RS) traceability. In practice, requirement traceability users can be divided into two groups: low end and high end traceability users. Issues related to the RT definition and its importance are discussed. Pre-RT and post-RT traceability problems and approaches are also discussed. A brief introduction to the tools used in RT is presented and their usefulness in addressing the RT problem is discussed in the section on tools support for RT. The article concludes with suggestions for related future work.