Efficient testing ensures requirements traceability and verification: Part 2

Requirements based testing, and its inherent process of requirements traceability and verification, is widely viewed as a best practice that is promulgated in corporate standards, such as the Capability Maturity Model Integration. CMMI is a process improvement approach that provides organizations with the essential elements of effective processes. It can be used to guide process improvement across a project, a division, or an entire organization. The benefits of CMMI have been established for critical as well as non-critical software.

As shown in the engineering process areas in the figure below, CMMI is predicted on the principals of requirements management (REQM) and requirements development (RD).

In the figure, the technical solution (TS) is the elaboration of the requirements into prototypes or components. The verification process area (VER) ensures that selected work products meet the specified requirements. The validation process area (VAL) incrementally validates products against the customer's needs. Validation may be performed in the operational environment or a simulated operational environment.

Finally, from the programming standards perspective, processes such as Extreme Programming, along with requirements-based development and testing are integral to all development activities. With Extreme Programming, as illustrated below, user "stories" (i.e. use cases) are prepared in co-operation with the customer as the pretext for the test scenarios before the code is developed (iteration).

Introduction to TBreq
TBreq, through its integration with the LDRA tool suite, which is comprised of LDRA Testbed (which includes Code Review, Quality Review, and Design Review components, as well as code coverage) and TBrun (a unit testing component), is a unique solution that can help overcome the challenges of mapping test specifications, unit test scenarios, test data, and code coverage verification with high level and design requirements.

TBreq interfaces directly with requirements management tools (DOORS, ReqPro, Word or Excel) to ensure traceability across the software lifecycle and the completeness of requirements coverage (see below).

Within the LDRA tool suite, TBreq creates test specifications and executable test cases directly from requirements. Test results are automatically returned to the requirements management tool to provide "round-trip" requirements traceability verification.