Wouldn’t it be nice if we easily could trace the impact of a change in a requirement? Lately I was faced this question, and spent some thoughts on it. For example, regarding Java code, we might use an annotation like this:

@Requirement(id = "REQ0206", version="1.0")
public class CustomerAssignment {
...
}

But Java code is only part of the job. For XML (or XSD’s, XHTML’s and other XML-like formats), we could use someting like this:

...
<r:req xmlns:r="nl.jointeffort.analysis" id="REQ301"/>
...

And last but not least, we may write a simple Maven plugin that generates a report of code artifacts that will be affected by a change in a requirement.

Would you use this? Please let me know.