Numerous companies all over the world recently start to understand the importance of establishing requirements for testing – it’s needed to implement each software development project and finally – to run business processes properly.
According to the gathered analytics, there are the following reasons why an interest in the proper establishment of requirements during web testing has become more popular:
- Gradual complexification of business processes (due to the general globalization of business);
- Significant exponential popularity to automate such processes.
This article contains the most popular advantages of implementing requirement analysis in software testing and also the reasons why we need to engage business clients in a process of developing the product requirements.
How can we improve the quality of software requirements?
Most IT companies that release custom-made products each year receive serious complaints about incorrect functionality that has been implemented or released components that do not completely correspond to business goals.
It happens due to notorious poor-quality requirements for web development/testing.
But where do poor-quality requirements come from if a client and a sales department discussed each point of terms of reference? There are sufficient factors – this we can say for sure.
We can mention some of them:
- A communication process is not properly built;
- The difference in culture;
- A low level of engagement of key workers in studying client’s business goals;
- Lack of information on implementation and so on.
To prevent these problems from happening in your teams, you should perform software development/testing according to the rule: requirement establishment and software testing are happening at the same time. But how can we actually reach this?
When the first part of the requirements is ready and verified by a client, QA engineers can start executing test cases.
If these requirements are considered poor-quality by a testing department, a tester will find this and tell a client about this.
And such feedback will help the business look at the requirements from another perspective and edit the parts that contradict the logic and need to be reviewed.
Therefore, test development provides feedback on the quality of requirements between a client and a contractor.
But on the other hand, properly written business processes enrich a testing process with data on a current project.
Speaking with business analysts, QA specialists can better understand what parameters and distinctive features should be checked primarily while assigning a project to a client.
Such a practice helps to distribute technical efforts at testing according to current business priorities (we should test primarily the things that are critical).
Visualizing the requirements on the basis of tendencies of an IT market
Why can successful IT companies easily increase their efforts to release and support the software that is popular in some way?
The thing is that they constantly track all popular market tendencies and try to grow and develop together with them.
To estimate what tendencies that are directly connected with a process of requirement establishment are available on the market, we can analyze the available tools.
The tools are based on a certain methodology, therefore, software evolution shows the evolution of the used methodologies.Why is a simpler product better than overwhelmed functionality?
If we analyze all popular tendencies from the beginning to the end, we should primarily analyze the companies that do not use third-party software in their work.
Such IT players document technical requirements in special documents, whose volume is from 100 pages.
Such documents are hard to analyze not only by the analytics department but other members of a development/testing process – clients, developers, testers, and end-users.
We’d like to add that it’s hard to maintain requirements in a convenient form, track all changes, add additional data at the stage of separate requirements and also build the connection between different types of requirements.
The next stage of technical requirement management belongs to professional tools to manage such requirements – they can take all drawbacks of a document-oriented approach into account.
But this will affect the user-friendliness.
Such powerful tools were hard to use by a business client.
Finally, they were excluded from a process of requirement verification and that, in turn, increased the risk to develop software that can’t satisfy the business needs.
At some time, new products entered the IT market – they have properly implemented an intuitive approach to gathering requirements (from visualization to use case operation).
All requirements that are available in a simple form completely exclude any mentions of ambiguity, are completely understandood by every member of a process and help to increase the possibility to reach a mutually expected result.
The main factor that became a catalyst of appearing of such products was a higher number of tasks that could be done by offshore teams or outsourced ones.
Since such a type of activity requires properly built processes of development and technical support of software, like using service-oriented architecture, maintaining industry and legal standards (like Sarbanes-Oxley).
Short conclusion
Companies aimed at successful implementation of the required tasks need to contribute to constant integrating of the processes of finding differences in the requirements to testing, to develop qualitative software and provide business with flexible IT solutions.
Only win-win collaboration of business interests and an IT field on the requirements is the main factor of success in constantly growing rivalry and widespread globalization of a web market.
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