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.