Assessing requirements engineering and software test alignment—Five case studies

Unterkalmsteiner, Michael; Gorschek, Tony; Feldt, Robert; Klotins, Eriks

doi:10.1016/j.jss.2015.07.018

Cited by 14 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 76 publications

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“…We developed this method, which is inspired by our previous work on post-mortem analysis [13], to cater for STA's de-centralized improvement strategy where independent initiatives work toward a common goal. This lack of central organization allows for maximum flexibility in the organizations' units to plan improvements, makes it however also more difficult to coordinate and benefit from synergetic effects.…”

Section: Process Improvement Archaeologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Process Improvement Archaeology: What Led Us Here, and What’s Next?

Unterkalmsteiner

Gorschek

2018

IEEE Softw.

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While in every organization corporate culture and history change over time, intentional efforts to identify performance problems are of particular interest when trying to understand the current state of an organization. The results of past improvement initiatives can shed light on the evolution of an organization, and represent, with the advantage of perfect hindsight, a learning opportunity for future process improvements. We encountered the opportunity to test this premise in an applied research collaboration with the Swedish Transport Administration (STA), the government agency responsible for the planning, implementation and maintenance of long-term rail, road, shipping and aviation infrastructure in Sweden.The agency was formed in 2010 in order to render the, until then separate road, railway and maritime agencies, more efficient. To achieve the government's goal of increasing productivity and innovation in the construction market, STA targets that by 2018, 50% of the total project volume is realized in the form of design/build contracts, allowing the agency to focus its efforts on core competencies and outsource other activities to suppliers [1]. Also in the software industry, outsourcing of IT services is a common and growing business practice [2]. Design/build contracts are particularly attractive for STA as solution providers can innovate, develop and use components that work as an integrated whole, taking also over responsibilities and risks for activities that were previously carried out by the client [3], i.e. the STA. However, this form of project delivery requires also an increased competence in requirements engineering, communication and management since the design work is outsourced to a solution provider. STA (and its precursors organizations) recognized this need in the early 2000's and invested resources to improve in the area of requirements engineering. Today, STA is very conscious about the importance of requirements engineering and management as part of their overall development processes. Therefore, we decided to perform a Process Improvement Archaeology (PIA) to better understand the current processes and devise new directions for further improvements addressing the currently encountered challenges. Before we look at the PIA steps and its results in more detail, we provide the context and motivation for focusing the investigation on requirements engineering in particular.A look over the tea cup's rim Requirements engineering is a central part in the development of software intensive products, governing planning, effective implementation and product quality [4]. This is even more emphasized in projects where the design and implementation is outsourced to a software supplier [5]. Research and practice in this area has therefore sought to improve and validate requirements engineering concepts in various domains, adapting them to the particular context. A witness to the growing knowledge base on requirements engineering are the

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Section: Process Improvement Archaeologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Process Improvement Archaeology: What Led Us Here, and What’s Next?

Unterkalmsteiner

Gorschek

2018

IEEE Softw.

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“…Both researchers and practitioners are interested in binding requirements and testing activities more closely together [17], [5], [16], [10]. However, these activities, especially the documentation management, are still separated and performed by different people [9].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aligning Requirements and Acceptance Tests via Automatically Generated Guidance

Hotomski

Charrada

Glinz

2017

2017 IEEE 25th International Requirements Engineering Conference Workshops (REW)

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Keeping requirements and acceptance test documents aligned and up-to-date plays an important role in the success of software projects. In practice, these documents are not always aligned with each other, nor with the actual system behaviour. A previous study showed that even when requirements are updated, acceptance tests might stay outdated, which often leads to quality problems and unintended costs. In order to keep the requirements and test documents in a consistent state, we are developing an approach that automatically generates guidance on how to change impacted acceptance tests when changes in requirements occur. In this paper, we briefly present our approach and a prototype tool that implements it. A preliminary evaluation of our approach yielded encouraging results.

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“…Unterkalmsteiner et al [1] studied and constructed a taxonomy for alignment of RE and ST based on the premise that information and the flow of information between RE and ST is a key ingredient in better coordination of the two activities and proposed a framework called RESTbench for the assessment of alignment in development organizations. The REST-bench framework was later validated successfully in industrial context in five different case studies of varying size in both plan driven and agile development [13]. The previous mapping study on the topic by Barmi et al [7] focused on the classification of different methods and techniques that support alignment that had been published between 2000 and 2010.…”

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Involvement of testers in RE is one such practice [5] [22]. Assessment of alignment: These studies, [1] and [13], provide a method for the assessment of RE and ST alignment (REST-bench) and thus provide improvement opportunity for better alignment. The assessment framework was introduced in [1] and in the later study [13] the assessment framework was successfully validated in real industrial settings.…”

Section: Focus Of Research (Rq2)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Assessment of alignment: These studies, [1] and [13], provide a method for the assessment of RE and ST alignment (REST-bench) and thus provide improvement opportunity for better alignment. The assessment framework was introduced in [1] and in the later study [13] the assessment framework was successfully validated in real industrial settings. The results also showed that large organizations with plan driven development processes can benefit more from alignment than small agile projects.…”

Section: Focus Of Research (Rq2)mentioning

confidence: 99%

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What Do We Know about Alignment of Requirements Engineering and Software Testing?

Karhapää

Haghighatkhah

Oivo

2017

Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering

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Context:The alignment of different software engineering activities for coordinated functioning and optimized product development is of great importance, particularly in industrialscale development. The link between intermediate activities has been researched extensively, but the link between requirements engineering (RE) and software testing (ST) is a relatively less explored area. Objective: The objective of this study is to aggregate, structure, and classify all existing research regarding alignment of RE and ST published by the end of 2015. Method: We conducted a systematic mapping study (SMS) and aggregated all studies relevant to our scope. The primary studies are analyzed in terms of publication trend, focus area, i.e., how alignment is supported, the application domain and benefits and challenges, methodological data, and scientific rigor and industrial relevance. Results: There is a growing interest towards the topic. Several different techniques have been identified to improve RE and ST alignment. Test generation from requirements specification has received most attention. Alignment of RE and ST is particularly important for large safety-critical domains. While many challenges have been reported, the supporting evidence for benefits is scarce. Frameworks/methods/techniques is the most frequent contribution type. Solution proposal and evaluation research were the most frequently applied research type. Case study research was the most frequently applied research method, however, almost half of the studies did not clearly report any research method. Conclusion: Despite the numerous approaches that are proposed, it is not clear what approach is suitable in what context and why. To support industry in RE and ST alignment, guidelines and tool support are needed. The supporting evidence for claimed benefits is very limited. Overall, the research area is in its early stages and an increase in both the number and rigor of empirical studies are required.

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Assessing requirements engineering and software test alignment—Five case studies

Cited by 14 publications

References 76 publications

Process Improvement Archaeology: What Led Us Here, and What’s Next?

Process Improvement Archaeology: What Led Us Here, and What’s Next?

Aligning Requirements and Acceptance Tests via Automatically Generated Guidance

What Do We Know about Alignment of Requirements Engineering and Software Testing?

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