How Dotphoton Built Requirements Traceability in Grist to European Space Agency Standards
Requirements traceability is one of the most painful parts of regulated engineering work. The legacy tools cost tens of thousands of euros per seat. Project management tools weren't built for audit trails. Excel and Word fall apart the moment an auditor asks for a chain of evidence — or the moment a French version of Word adds a page break your colleague's English version doesn't have. This webinar shows how Dotphoton, a Swiss deep-tech company, built a quality assurance and requirements traceability system in Grist that meets the engineering standards of the European Space Agency. Bruno Sanguinetti, CTO and co-founder of Dotphoton, walks through three generations of the system, the alternatives his team evaluated (IBM Doors, Notion, Microsoft Word, Monday.com, Airtable), the custom Typst integration that generates delivery-ready PDFs on demand, and how they now use Grist alongside a local LLM for CRM, quoting, and financial planning. Hosted by Anais Concepcion, CEO of Grist Labs. CHAPTERS 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 RESOURCES MENTIONED Bruno's template: https://templates.getgrist.com/vPDYpN6DWu6b/Requirements-Traceability The Typst widget for PDF generation in Grist (built by David Fabijan): https://grist-marketing.getgrist.com/oHQcp1bG7DS8/Community-Widgets/p/4 Grist 101 webinar for new users: https://www.getgrist.com/webinars/grist-101-new-users-guide/ Grist documentation and getting started guide: https://support.getgrist.com/getting-started/ Grist community forum: https://community.getgrist.com/ Typst (open-source typesetting system): https://typst.app/ 🚀 ABOUT THE SPEAKERS Bruno Sanguinetti is co-founder and CTO of Dotphoton, a Swiss deep-tech company building image compression and processing technology adapted for machine vision. His technology is used by Samsung, SK Hynix, and is part of the Ariane rocket system. Before founding Dotphoton, Bruno was a senior researcher in quantum optics at the University of Geneva. Anais Concepcion is CEO of Grist Labs. A product and growth strategist by background, Anais leads sales, go-to-market, and overall direction at Grist, where she hosts the customer spotlight series. Want to talk through whether Grist is right for your team? Book a 15-minute call: https://www.getgrist.com #Grist #RequirementsTraceability #IBMDoorsAlternative #QualityAssurance #SpaceEngineering #OpenSource #EuropeanSpaceAgency #Dotphoton #Engineering #Aerospace #Defense #MedicalDevices #RegulatedIndustries #SpreadsheetDatabase #Typst #PDF