Traceability between Cross-Functional-Teams

Traceability between different views, which exist in cross-functional teams, is essential for concurrent engineering. The views (products) of the various teams must be interrelated to each other and presented in a suitable way to emphasize inconsistencies, conflicts, different opportunities. Moreover, decisions together with their rationales must be made explicit. We have developed and implemented a concurrent engineering environment which is based on four basic ideas: (1) record, use, and maintain product interrelations during the concurrent engineering process; (2) capture the decisions and their rationale made during the process; (3) use formal product models to enable product interrelation; (4) provide suitable computer supported tools which hide the formal models and automate the recording of interrelations. First experiences show, that the use of our environment enables traceability of the product interrelations and the decision made within a concurrent engineering process and leads to improved and more consistent process results (products).