Test What Matters: Align Business Requirements with Testing Priorities

The Problem

It is widely accepted that errors and omissions in defining, capturing and managing business requirements are a leading cause of project failures, defects and downstream rework. Most companies employ some method of requirements management and certainly some means of software quality testing, but most do not - or can not - link them together. The fact that requirements very often do not encompass application quality – or how developers and QA will be able to validate specific functionality and performance - is indicative of the existing gap between business teams and the development and QA personnel held responsible for delivering the application. Some of the challenges shared by teams on either side of this gap are:

• Limited involvement in requirements gathering.
• Inability to collect complete requirements that capture quality expectations.
• Difficulty prioritizing requirements with development and testing.
• No or poor linkage and traceability of business needs and testing plans.
• Lack of visibility into change impact to development and test.
• Lack of notification that changes have been implemented.

What You Need

You need a fresh approach to software testing that reduces the cost of defects, keeps you on schedule and aligns requirements at the beginning of a project with quality expectations for testing to ensure final deliverables consistently meet business needs. Requirements-based testing can help you, but it is dependent on the following:

• Management that acknowledges that problems start with requirements and that there is room and means to improve.
• The means to gather complete requirements that provide details about quality expectations
• A requirements management process that allows traceability and prioritization of testing
• The capability to create and manage testing requirements to build out the most effective test plans and use of test automation

Borland’s Solution for Requirements-Based Testing:

Borland is uniquely positioned to help you embrace requirements-based testing. Once you have identified where to focus, the essentials of requirements-based testing are provided perfectly with the following Borland Application Lifecycle Management products:

Borland Caliber® DefineIT™ Caliber DefineIT is designed to ensure that software requirements are defined completely and accurately from the beginning. Business, analyst, development and test teams can now collaborate with the use of visual storyboards to capture detailed business scenarios - that include quality attributes - and in just a few mouse clicks generate detailed test cases and export and synchronize with SilkCentral and CaliberRM™.

Borland CaliberRM™ CaliberRM is an enterprise software requirements management system designed to facilitate collaboration, impact analysis, and communication in the definition and management of changing requirements. For requirements-based testing, team members understand at a glance how business requirements are connected directly with testing activities and can make quick assessments of the impact of proposed additions or changes in requirements regarding the time and effort related to testing.

SilkCentral® Test Manager™ Borland’s foundation for enterprise software test management delivers visibility and control of project quality aligned with business requirements and is integrated with CaliberRM to maintain bi-directional traceability and change impact analysis between business requirements and test activities. Additionally, automatically-generated test cases from Caliber DefineIT are directly placed into SilkCentral Test Manager’s repository to aid in project scoping and test planning.

Software Test Automation Borland SilkPerformer® for performance and load testing and Borland SilkTest® for functional test automation enhance the value of requirements-based testing with test efficiency and automation. Understanding priority and quality expectation early in the lifecycle will help identify how and where to apply the power of test automation, further reducing test cycle time and improving your ability to cover more of the application with better tests.