105. Requirements Based Testing Techniques: Modeling and Use Cases

1 Day Tutorial

This seminar is designed for anyone who will ever have anything to do with Requirements.

Pretty much everyone understands that the Requirements are the biggest bug repository in all of software development. It just makes sense that we should be testing them up front, before anyone does anything to develop them. But, how do you test words on paper?  Pretty much everyone agrees that testers should be involved during the requirements development process; but what should they be doing? 

This class teaches modeling techniques that you can use to test the written requirements, gather new requirements, and identify ambiguous and buggy requirements --- before any code has ever been written.  Models provide analytical tools for scenario and use case development.  Models let us build a map of the thing we are analyzing, while it is still just words on paper.   We can use these maps to identify scope boundaries, scenarios that are and are not described in the requirements, logic errors, ambiguities and missing exception handlers.

Scenarios, use cases, and other work products that are developed using modeling techniques, provide the foundation for system design, risk analysis, test design, test case development and, eventually, user acceptance tests.

Students learn

• Tell the difference between good and bad requirements (testable and un-testable, ambiguous and non ambiguous, etc.)
• Use models such as Use Cases, Logic Flow Diagrams, UML 2.0 Activity Diagrams and others to develop complete, accurate, and testable requirements
• Determine the business problem and translate it into Scenarios and Use Cases
• Define quality requirements and use cases that account for all the actors in the system and their needs
• Delimit and partition scope; identify appropriate detail levels for requirements, Use Cases, and Logic Flow.
• Understand how to verify requirements prior to traditional code/test cycle

Outline

• Introduction to path and scenario analysis for modeling
  • How to ask the hard questions
• Use Modeling techniques to verify and validate requirements
  prior to traditional code/test cycle
•  Bridge the gap between requirements and design

Determining customer and producer quality requirements and additional sources of requirements and risk

• Use Cases as a modeling tool to build stories from logic flow maps
• Keeping testable requirements doable