Tool support to aligning requirements and testing through behaviour-driven requirements patterns (original) (raw)
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Aligning requirements and testing through metamodeling and patterns: design and evaluation
Requirements Engineering, 2022
Poorly executed requirements engineering activities profoundly affect the deliverables' quality and project's budget and schedule. High-quality requirements reuse through requirement patterns has been widely discussed to mitigate these adverse outcomes. Requirement patterns aggregate similar applications' behaviors and services into well-defined templates that can be reused in later specifications. The abstraction capabilities of metamodeling have shown promising results concerning the improvement of the requirement specifications' quality and professionals' productivity. However, there is a lack of research on requirement patterns beyond requirements engineering, even using metamodels as the underlying structure. Besides, most companies often struggle with the cost, rework, and delay effects resulting from a weak alignment between requirements and testing. In this paper, we present a novel metamodeling approach, called Software Pattern MetaModel (SoPaMM), which aligns requirements and testing through requirement patterns and test patterns. Influenced by well-established agile practices, SoPaMM describes functional requirement patterns and acceptance test patterns as user stories integrated with executable behaviors. Another novelty is the evaluation of SoPaMM's quality properties against a metamodel quality evaluation framework. We detail the evaluation planning, discuss evaluation results, and present our study's threats to validity. Our experience with the design and evaluation of SoPaMM is summarized as lessons learned.
5 Constructing and Using Software Requirements Patterns
2012
Software requirement reuse strategies are necessary to capitalize and reuse knowledge in the requirements engineering phase. The PABRE framework is designed to support requirement reuse through the use of software requirement patterns. It consists of a meta-model that describes the main concepts around the notion of pattern; a method to conduct the elicitation and documentation processes; a catalogue of patterns; and a tool that supports the catalogue’s management and use. In this chapter all these elements are presented in detail making emphasis on the construction, use and evolution of software requirement patterns. Furthermore, the chapter includes the construction of a catalogue of non-technical software requirement patterns for illustration purposes.
2013 35th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2013
Software requirements reuse becomes a fundamental activity for those IT organizations that conduct requirements engineering processes in similar settings. One strategy to implement this reuse is by exploiting a catalogue of software requirement patterns (SRPs). In this tutorial, we provide an introduction to the concept of SRP, summarise several existing approaches, and reflect on the consequences on several requirements engineering processes and activities. We take one of these approaches, the PABRE framework, as exemplar for the tutorial and analyse in more depth the catalogue of SRP that is proposed. We apply the concepts given on a practical exercise.
Tool for Generating Behavior-Driven Development Test-Cases
Journal of Information Systems Engineering and Business Intelligence
Background: Testing using Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) techniques is one of the practices of Agile software development. This technique composes a test-case based on a use case scenario, for web application acceptance tests.Objective: In this study, we developed a tool to generate test case codes from BDD scenario definitions to help and facilitate practitioners to conduct testing.Methods: The generated test case code is made according to the codeception framework format so that it can be directly executed by the tester. The procedure is performed as follows: map the correlation of the language used in BDD (gherkin language) and the code syntax of the test code in the codeception framework, designed the GUIs in such a way that users can easily transform the Use Case Scenario, built the tool so that it can generate test cases codes. Evaluation is done by gathering respondents; ask to run the application and gathering feedback from respondents.Results: This tool can generate a ...
Bridging the Gap between Requirements Modeling and Behavior-Driven Development
2019 ACM/IEEE 22nd International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS)
Acceptance criteria (AC) are implementation agnostic conditions that a system must meet to be consistent with its requirements and be accepted by its stakeholders. Each acceptance criterion is typically expressed as a naturallanguage statement with a clear pass or fail outcome. Writing AC is a tedious and error-prone activity, especially when the requirements specifications evolve and there are different analysts and testing teams involved. Analysts and testers must iterate multiple times to ensure that AC are understandable and feasible, and accurately address the most important requirements and workflows of the system being developed. In many cases, analysts express requirements through models, along with natural language, typically in some variant of the UML. AC must then be derived by developers and testers from such models. In this paper, we bridge the gap between requirements models and AC by providing a UML-based modeling methodology and an automated solution to generate AC. We target AC in the form of Behavioral Specifications in the context of Behavioral-Driven Development (BDD), a widely used agile practice in many application domains. More specially we target the well-known Gherkin language to express AC, which then can be used to generate executable test cases. We evaluate our modeling methodology and AC generation solution through an industrial case study in the financial domain. Our results suggest that (1) our methodology is feasible to apply in practice, and (2) the additional modeling effort required by our methodology is outweighed by the benefits the methodology brings in terms of automated and systematic AC generation and improved model precision.
Elaboration of software requirements documents by means of patterns instantiation
Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development, 2017
Studies show that problems associated with the requirements specifications are widely recognized for affecting software quality and impacting effectiveness of its development process. The reuse of knowledge obtained from previous projects can facilitate the identification and writing of the requirements to reach the elaboration of a complete and consistent requirements document. Software patterns are a solution to capture and reuse knowledge from different contexts for the software development. On the information system domain, it is common to find a set of requirements that have similar characteristics and repeat themselves in different systems of this domain, indicating a possibility of becoming a requirements pattern. By reusing knowledge obtained in previous projects, requirements patterns can be elaborated to facilitate a more complete and consistent specification of system requirements in that domain. The advantage of using requirements patterns is to provide the software engineer a starting point for the elaboration of requirements documents, instead of starting from scratch to solve known problems. The requirements patterns can contribute to the improvement of the software quality, minimize the development time and costs, because previously defined and tested solutions are reused. This paper shows a set of functional requirements patterns and business rules elaborated to help the software engineer in the writing of the requirements document. The non-functional requirements were not considered in this project. A computational support was developed, based on that set of patterns, to facilitate the organized and complete writing of the requirements document. Case studies are presented with the use of the computational support.
On the Requirements Pattern of Software Engineering
2002
Nowadays, patterns are one of the latest hot topics in software development. The goal of patterns within the software community is to create a body of literature to help software developers resolve recurring problems encountered throughout all of software development. This paper illustrates the efforts for applying the patterns paradigm in requirements engineering. The current research focusing on requirements pattern is also described.
Towards the automated generation of abstract test cases from requirements models
2014 IEEE 1st International Workshop on Requirements Engineering and Testing (RET), 2014
In a testing process, the design, selection, creation and execution of test cases is a very time-consuming and error-prone task when done manually, since suitable and effective test cases must be obtained from the requirements. This paper presents a model-driven testing approach for conceptual schemas that automatically generates a set of abstract test cases, from requirements models. In this way, tests and requirements are linked together to find defects as soon as possible, which can considerably reduce the risk of defects and project reworking. The authors propose a generation strategy which consists of: two metamodels, a set of transformations rules which are used to generate a Test Model, and the Abstract Test Cases from an existing approach to communication-oriented Requirements Engineering; and an algorithm based on Breadth-First Search. A practical application of our approach is included.
Maintaining Behaviour Driven Development Specifications: Challenges and Opportunities
In Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) the behaviour of a software system is specified as a set of example interactions with the system using a “Given-When-Then” structure. These examples are expressed in high level domain-specific terms, and are executable. They thus act both as a specification of requirements and as tests that can verify whether the current system implementation provides the desired behaviour or not. This approach has many advantages but also presents some problems. When the number of examples grows, BDD specifications can become costly to maintain and extend. Some teams find that parts of the system are effectively frozen due to the challenges of finding and modifying the examples associated with them. We surveyed 75 BDD practitioners from 26 countries to understand the extent of BDD use, its benefits and challenges, and specifically the challenges of maintaining BDD specifications in practice. We found that BDD is in active use amongst respondents, and that the use of domain specific terms, improving communication among stakeholders, the executable nature of BDD specifications, and facilitating comprehension of code intentions are the main benefits of BDD. The results also showed that BDD specifications suffer the same maintenance challenges found in automated test suites more generally. We map the survey results to the literature, and propose 10 research opportunities in this area.