If your team manages requirements traceability for regulated engineering work, you’ve probably hit the same wall Dotphoton did. The legacy tools cost $30,000 before you’ve written a single requirement. Project management tools weren’t built for traceability. Excel can technically hold the data but falls apart the moment an auditor asks for a chain of evidence.

Bruno Sanguinetti, co-founder of Dotphoton, walks us through how his team built a full quality assurance and requirements traceability system in Grist that runs on-prem, meets the engineering standards of the European Space Agency, and produces delivery-ready PDFs on demand.

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction and what Dotphoton does
03:15 The project: developing an image compressor for satellites
06:30 What is requirements traceability and why it matters
10:45 The V-model and why most teams get bogged down in quality assurance instead of quality
14:20 Why Dotphoton chose Grist over IBM Doors, Notion, Excel, and Word
19:00 Live walkthrough: three generations of the traceability system in Grist
26:30 The Typst PDF integration and the custom widget
33:00 Open source as a decision factor: the concerns Dotphoton worked through
38:15 Using Grist with a local LLM for CRM and quoting (HubSpot replacement)
44:00 Audience Q&A: implementation time, scaling, change tracking, learning Grist
56:30 Parting advice: the Picasso bison and finding the essential lines of your system

Topics

1. The honest version of choosing open source for a regulated workload, including the concerns Dotphoton worked through
2. How Dotphoton evaluated the alternatives, including IBM Doors, Notion, and other spreadsheet-database tools, and why Grist was the only one that worked
3. How requirements traceability works structurally in Grist, from initial requirement through test, implementation, and audit-ready deliverable
4. A live walkthrough of the custom widget that turns a requirement in Grist into a delivery-ready PDF, on demand

Useful links

• Bruno’s template
• The Typst widget for PDF generation in Grist.
• Grist 101 webinar for new users.
• More webinars: https://www.getgrist.com/webinars/
• Help Center: https://support.getgrist.com/
• Community Forum: https://community.getgrist.com/
• Discord: https://discord.gg/MYKpYQ3fbP
• Community widget gallery: https://grist-marketing.getgrist.com/oHQcp1bG7DS8/Community-Widgets/p/4