QAGuild

Various test professionals will tell you that this process or that process is the best test process to deliver your project on time and on budget. The plain truth is that identifying the test process that suits an organisation will be arrive at by trial and error. A test process that some find suitable may not suit the work culture of another company. Therefore in identifying the test process that will be suitable for your company it is important to know that different processes have there strengths and weakness.

A requirement is an expected behaviour of a software or system. In requirements based testing, the whole object of the testing regime is to map the test cases to the requirements as expected by the user. As with all test processes, it is expected that a test plan would be in place before testing begin. The test plan would give the whole team a perspective of the impending work. It will define the roles and responsibilities, deliverables, entry and exit criteria etc.

Requirements based testing is composed of a few well defined activities. These include the creation of a traceability matrix. In creating the traceability matrix, the business users or the business analyst will functionally decompose the requirements into well defined and identifiable components. The test cases are then designed to test the components. Once the test cases and the requirements have all been captured in the traceability matrix, this can then be used to determine the amount of test coverage from the requirements.

There are various ways in which the traceability matrix are used depending on the organisation. Some organisations depend on what is called the “Good enough”. Once a percentage of tests are deemed good enough then the pass criteria can be achieved. Based on the mapped test cases, any defects encountered during testing are then mapped to the requirements. It is critical to the entire process that the requirements would have been signed off by the business prior to the commencement of testing. This provides the round trip iterative coverage for the test process starting with requirements and then through the test cases and test coverage to the defects. Once the defects are fixed they are then revalidated against the requirements