Requirements Based Testing – Process Overview

This paper addresses issues faced in the requirements-based testing (RBT) process and describes a strategy to integrate testing throughout the development life cycle and focus on the quality of the Requirements Specification. The result is early defect detection and prevention, reducing costs by finding and fixing defects earlier in the development process.

The requirements-based testing (RBT) process addresses two major issues: first, validating that the requirements are correct, complete, unambiguous, and logically consistent; and second, designing a necessary and sufficient (from a black box perspective) set of test cases from those requirements to ensure that the design and code fully meet those requirements. In designing tests two issues need to be overcome: reducing the immensely large number of potential tests down a reasonable size set and ensuring that the tests got the right answer for the right reason. The RBT process does not assume, going in, that we will see good Requirements Specifications. That is very rarely the case. The RBT process will drive out ambiguity and drive down the level of detail.

The overall RBT strategy is to integrate testing throughout the development life cycle and focus on the quality of the Requirements Specification. This leads to early defect detection which has been shown to be much less expensive than finding defects during integration testing or later. The RBT process also has a focus on defect prevention, not just defect detection.

To put the RBT process into perspective, testing can be divided into the following eight activities:

[Read this Whitepaper]

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Mark Test said:

	... Borland also has an RBT whitepaper I found particularly useful in designing a solution using Caliber and SilkCentral TestManager.
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October 28, 2008
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