Incorporating test ability in software requirement engineering process

Abstract

Failure of software projects has always been a matter of concern for the software industry and the research states that insufficient testing of requirements happens to be the major reason behind it. The idea of testing the requirement engineering phase of software development lifecycle not only prevents the defects from progressing in the later phases, but also saves the effort and cost required to fix those defects. Beside the introduction of a number of approaches to test requirements, software engineers still face the problems. Testing software requirements effectively by a single technique is nearly impossible because one technique cannot cover all the aspects of testing. Combining multiple techniques to avail the benefits of their best features can help the requirement engineers to enhance the process of requirements testing. Hence, unlike the previous research work done on testing the software requirements, this research aims at incorporating a hybrid testing technique into the process of requirement engineering. The proposed technique is a combination of inspection and modeling method of requirements testing. The testing process has been divided into five steps to verify the requirements according to the IEEE Std. 830-1998 [1] quality criteria for requirements specifications. The proposed approach has been applied on the raw requirements of two computing systems. One is a “Book borrowing module of library management system” and the other is “Mobile battery charging system”. After applying the hybrid technique on these two systems, the research claims at generating error free and testable requirements which are then executed to generate their test cases. A comparing analysis of the results obtained by the proposed technique has been done with the results of both case studies. The comparison reveals that the proposed technique has successfully verified all the eight quality characteristics stated by IEEE Std. 830-1998.