A document is a collection of related Integrity Lifecycle Manager items. The Document view is the interface you use to view and modify documents and content in a cohesive tree structure. With the applicable permissions, you can manage all aspects of document and content creation and modification, including creating relationships between content items across and between domains, called trace relationships.

Integrity Lifecycle Manager uses specific terms to describe the components of a root document. Specifically, segment is a root document, the container for all content; node is any content within that root document including individual content items and subsegments, and shared item is the shared content.

Documents are typically used in the requirements management and test management domains, although numerous other domains of analysis are supported by the Integrity Lifecycle Manager document model. For example, a requirement item could be verified by a test case and that requirement and test case pair could be connected to a larger test suite document using a relationship that collectively verifies a major software change.