Nodes and Routes

3 min read

Sync and Canon proposals give you a draft. Curation is what turns it into a map somebody can rely on.

Work with a Node

Select any node in the tree or on the canvas to open the inspector — a docked column holding everything about that node.

From the inspector you can:

Rename it and change its type
Write a description
Link requirements, test cases and folders
See its coverage tiles — Tests, Passed, Failed, Not run
See the Canon citations it was grounded in, if it came from a proposal
Run impact analysis or generate test cases for it

Anything you edit here is marked as curated, and a later sync will not overwrite it.

Add a Node

Select Add a node in the action rail, or add one under a selected node. Give it a title and a type.

Three rules the map enforces:

Behaviour nodes never have children. A behaviour is one observable action or rule — if it needs children, it is a feature.
Re-parenting cannot create a cycle. A node cannot be moved under its own descendant.
Links move with the node. Requirements and test cases linked to a node stay linked when it moves.

Move and Merge

Move under… re-parents a node, taking its whole subtree with it.

Merge into… folds a node into another one. Use it when sync and a Canon proposal both produced a node for the same part of the product under different names.

On the canvas you can also drag nodes freely, and marquee-select several to move them together. Once you have dragged a node, its position is authoritative — auto-layout will not move it back.

Delete a Node

The inspector’s danger zone offers two deletes when a node has children:

Delete just this node — children are re-parented upward
Delete with N inside — the whole subtree goes

Link a Node to Real Work

A node with nothing linked is a heading. Linking is what gives coverage and impact analysis something to walk.

Select the node and open its inspector.
Under Linked work, add the requirements, test cases or folders this part of the product corresponds to.
Linking a folder pulls in every test case in it and below it, which is usually what you want for an area or a screen.

A node can link to requirements, test cases, folders and Canon documents. Releases and defects are deliberately not linkable — they reach the map indirectly, through executions and references, which is how impact analysis resolves them.

Routes

Routes are relationships containment cannot express. Draw them on the canvas.

A user moves from one screen to another. Label the route with what they click — “Select a release row” — so the map reads like the product.

A pair of screens a user can walk both ways is one bidirectional route, not two.

Dependency

The source depends on the target: changing the target can break the source.

The Traceability Overlay

On the canvas, Show areas connected by a shared test case or defect draws links between nodes that share evidence — a test case that touches both, or a defect referencing both.

These are computed live and never saved. They come from requirement ↔ test case and defect ↔ entity relationships that already exist in the Repository and the defect tracker, so storing a copy would create a second source of truth that silently goes stale the moment someone edits a test case.

Because they are live, the count only means something while the overlay is on.

Find and Filter

On the canvas, the toolbar offers search and facets — show me the red ones, show me only screens, what did the AI add?

Filtering dims rather than removes, so the map stays readable while you narrow it and you keep your sense of where things are.