AbstractEvery customer wants good requirements traceability when they start a new program. They want to ensure their contractor provide “tops down” traceability when deriving lower‐level requirements to ensure the original customer requirements are met thus avoid what is commonly called “requirements creep”. However, most customers are soon disappointed about the methodology their contractors use when trying to actually implement requirements traceability. After a while most contractors persuade their customers to relax their expectations and finally drop the requirements traceability task and say “Let's just design and build it, we're just wasting time.”This paper will present a “how‐to‐do” requirements traceability more efficiently as well as “how‐to‐use” the information more effectively once you've done all that work. Topics include customer requirements traceability; derived requirements traceability; requirements allocation traceability; design compliance traceability; verification traceability; product sell‐off traceability; and operational lessons learned traceability. Real experience and lessons learned from many programs are revealed to help avoid some of the pitfalls and provide more efficient methods for performing these tasks. A generic, multi‐user requirements traceability database is discussed to describe how to automate the requirements traceability p