Your first hour in Trace.Space

This is a walk through the parts of Trace.Space you will use every day, in the order that makes sense on day one. Each step takes a few minutes and links to the article that goes deeper. If you want the vocabulary first, read the article How Trace.Space is organized.

Open the sign-in page and continue with your Google, Microsoft or GitHub account, or enter your email address and click Continue with email to get a magic link. If a colleague invited you, sign in with the address the invitation was sent to and you land in their organization. If you signed up on your own, Trace.Space creates an organization for you with sample content. See Email authentication using Magic Link and Single Sign-On (SSO).

In the left sidebar, expand Items. A new organization has three top-level items: Welcome to Trace.Space, Sample project and Playground. Expand Sample project and click the document inside it, a NASA requirements specification for a high-altitude unmanned aircraft. It opens in the document view, with its sections and requirements one under the other. See Sample set.

The round buttons at the top right of the page switch between View as document, View as table and View as graph for the same items. Try the table to see one row per requirement with its attributes as columns, and the graph to see the items as nodes with traces between them. The gear next to the buttons opens View settings, where you can show item IDs and attribute names. See View modes.

Back in the document view, click any requirement. The right sidebar opens on the Details tab with the item's ID, type, attributes and its Traced to list. The other tabs hold Comments, Reviews and Runs, and the clock button shows the version history. Everything about an item that is not its text lives here. See Item details sidebar.

Use Playground in the tree; it exists for exactly this. Hover it, right-click the + that appears and choose a type under Add child item. Type a title, press Enter, and write in the text below; type / in the editor to insert a table, an image or a diagram. Once you have two items, the + on the divider between them in the document view adds another of the same type. Changes save as you type. See Creating items and project structure and Creating and editing items.

With your new item selected, find Traced to in the sidebar and click +. Search for a requirement from the sample project in Select item, click it, then choose a relationship such as is related to. The trace appears on both items, and hovering its icon reads it back as a sentence. See Traceability.

Click the View settings gear and switch on Quality checks under Features. Text that breaks a requirement-writing rule is now highlighted, and the Quality row at the top of the sidebar summarizes the result for the selected item. Click it to see every rule, and use Fix issues with AI on an attribute to get a rewritten version you can accept or discard. See Quality checks.

Hover the sample document in the tree, click its ... button, open Baseline and type a name into New baseline. Choose Baseline all to pin the document and everything below it at the current versions. The baseline appears under Baselines in the left sidebar; open it and click Freeze to lock it. See Creating Baselines.

Click Invite at the bottom of the left sidebar, enter one or more email addresses, click Next and then Send invites. Your colleague receives a link and lands in the same organization. Two people can edit the same item at once and see each other's cursors. See Inviting colleagues and Real-time collaboration.