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Thursday, April 11, 2013 - 2:00pm - 3:00pm
Special Topics

Driving Down Requirements Defects: A Tester’s Dream Come True

The software industry knows that the majority of software defects have their root cause in poor requirements. So how can testers help improve requirements? Richard Bender asserts that requirements quality significantly improves when testers systematically validate the requirements as they are developed. Applying scenario-driven reviews ensures that the requirements have the proper focus and scope. Ambiguity reviews quantitatively identify unclear areas of the specification leading to early defect detection and defect avoidance. Modeling the requirements via cause-effect graphing helps find missing requirements and identifies logical inconsistencies. Going further with this approach, domain experts and developers should review the tests derived from the requirements models to find additional defects. Join Richard to learn how testers—applying these processes in partnership with analysts—can reduce the percentage of defects caused by poor requirements from the usual 55–60 percent down to low single digits.

Richard Bender, BenderRBT

Richard Bender has over forty-five years experience in software with a primary focus on quality assurance and testing. He has consulted internationally to large and small corporations, government agencies, and the military. Richard’s work has included a wide variety of application classes and technology bases from embedded systems to super computer-based systems—and everything in between—consulting to both vendors and IT departments alike. He has been active in establishing industry standards for software quality and is a frequent speaker at conferences, universities, and corporate events.

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