Announcement: The process of building each product starts with compiling a list of requirements for it. In this article, you’ll find five crucial criteria that your requirements should comply with to boost the productivity of your workflow.
Have you ever wondered why testing is required even before you actually start building the product? The thing is that you should test not just the code but the initial prerequisites to it. In too many cases, bugs discovered in a product at any development phase can be monitored back to the requirements stage. Fixing them that late would involve too much time, funds, and stress. Below, you’ll find five essential criteria for requirements testing that will help you avoid mistakes at the initial stage and deliver a top-notch product with a minimum number of bugs.
5 Key Attributes of Requirements Testing
5 Key Attributes of Requirements Testing
Integrity
All requirements should be complete and exhaustive. They should contain all the details and data necessary to carry out the task. The heuristics approach to test requirements enables you to identify potential troubles before they occur relying on the past data about probabilities. This approach allows you to detect and analyze the following statistics:
- Which errors occurred with similar projects in the past
- How often it happened
- Which parts of the code were affected
Keep a database of bugs. Each time when compiling a new set of requirements, compare it with the database. The experts of Fortegrp.com state that this is one of the most productive methods of avoiding chronic mistakes. Its efficiency is much higher than that of bling testing.
Useful tip: feel free to use a nearly identical set of requirements for diverse products, slightly modifying it to meet the needs of a particular customer. It’s not just a lifehack to save your time. The longer your experience, the better you realize that without ready-made templates you’ll have to reinvent the wheel too often.
1. Clarity
Eliminate ambiguity when formulating software testing requirements. If each developer has their individual interpretation of the same requirement, this would inevitably lead to errors.
To avoid variant reading, try to accompany the most crucial terms with detailed explanations. The understanding of words and phrases depends not only on how clearly you formulate them but also on the expertise and knowledge of your readers. Consider compiling a glossary of terms that will serve as reference data to all the documents you write and distribute among your staff.
Ambiguity might arise when a familiar term is located in a context that allows multiple interpretations. Instead of inventing their own explanations, the staff should consult either the product owner or business analyst.
2. Accuracy
When asking yourself “What is a test requirements document?” you don’t even need to specify that each statement in this text is true-to-life and accurate — this is taken for granted. However, to err is human and sometimes we commit unfortunate mistakes. To avoid them, ask an assistant to proof-read your document before sharing it with the whole team. A QA requirement is considered as correct if it corresponds to the primary principles and objectives of the system and contributes to meeting the customer’s needs.
3. Disambiguation
Any given software test requirement should not contradict any other one. There are three sets of specifications that each statement should comply with:
- Internal standards
- External standards
- External documentation
To avoid contradictions, categorize the requirements. Establish separate categories for fonts, navigation, ads banners, etc and check if some of them might contradict the others. Most often, errors pop up when a top-level requirement is inconsistent or several lower-level ones contradict each other.
4. Controllability
Have you ever wondered what is an efficient way to ensure that the code is working? Of course, it’s testing it before it’s implemented. But the essence of this procedure doesn’t boil down to ensuring that the code is running. It might be working but failing to achieve the goals mentioned in the requirements. The code should be considered as functional and ready only if it helps to meet the client’s objectives.
Here we come to the meaningful question of the importance of Unit Testing. Before you start building the product, make sure you have the necessary tools and data to test it. If a product is testable, it would take you significantly less funds and effort to maintain it.
5. Additional Criteria
Sometimes you might come across the question “What are the two basic requirements of a good test?”. The answer would be: priority and measurability. This statement doesn’t contradict the above-listed criteria for testing requirements but complements them.
Measurability might be regarded as an additional aspect of controllability. This prerequisite can also be identified as testability or verifiability. To make sure that the product is working you should be able to single out its certain parts and elements and measure their characteristics.
Prioritizing is somewhat similar to categorization. You isolate the most crucial aspects first and deal with them before switching to the minor ones. This makes the working process more time-efficient and cost-efficient.
Mind that the analysis of the prerequisites should be completed before the first line of the code is written. You should finish with each software testing requirement before the iteration starts.
Conclusion
Now you know how to check software requirements and what you need to do it for. The above-listed criteria will help you to achieve higher customer satisfaction and deliver consistently better, functional and sustainable products. What’s more, thanks to a thorough requirements test you’ll be able to save funds and time on detecting and fixing bugs. To boost the productivity of your workflow, create a set of the basic requirements that after certain modifications can be applied nearly to each product.
