It would be extremely useful if EA supported the ability to inherit or copy/transfer requirement traces from parent to child elements in a composite component hierarchy, therefore allowing requirements to be allocated to high level components, and then transferred or copied to lower level components as the system decomposition proceeds.
This is probably best explained with a (simplified) example of what I'd like to acheive...
(1) Let's say the system requirements are already specified for the system (our role is not requirements elaboration - that's already been done to some extent by the client).
(2) A high level system decomposition exists, possibly created by us, but possibly by the client (as part of the presentation of system requirements)
(3) The requirements are imported into EA (e.g. using automation) as external requirement elements and the high level decomposition is modelled (say using a component model).
(4) As a first pass the requirements are traced (using Realisation links) to the top level components. This results in the applicable requirements appearing as external requirements in the properties of each top level component (in the "Require" tab). So far so good. In my imaginary system, each component is then assigned to a designer who must then decompose/elaborite it further and assign the requirements to lower level components as necessary, therefore providing our first full trace to the system decomposition.
(5) Designer "A" does this for component 1, creating sub-components 1a, 1b, 1c etc. He then wants to replicate selected requirement traces for component 1 to it's sub-components, dependant of course on each component's responsibilities in the new system.
For example, the requirement might be "The system shall displayed all logged events" which is traced at the top level to the "Monitoring & Control Subsystem". In elaborating the M&C Subsystem, the designer has defined an "Event Log Display" which naturally would realise this requirement, so he transfers that trace to the lower level Event Log Display component. In fact, ideally the trace should be replicated, because the subsystem above still has overall responsibility for meeting this requirement (and it may be useful to retain the subsystem level trace).
So it would be useful if EA supported full or selective inheritance (copy) of traces of requirements from a higher level component to it's sub-components. I'm thinking of something perhaps triggered from the properities window of each child component (either a new dialog, or the ability to "show parent requirements" in the Require tab and functions to selectively import them).
Knowing EA there's no doubt some way to do this already, but I haven't found it yet.
Martin
