Eliciting Environmental Opposites for Requirements-Based Testing

Abstract

Many software failures originate in the environment. To make the environment assumptions explicit in the requirements-based testing process, we propose to construct opposites where an implemented software feature can be observed and evaluated in different yet related contexts. In this paper, we share our manual analysis of such environmental opposites. Specifically, we identified 127 opposite pairs of 32 Webex’s continuously released features over three months. Our results not only demonstrate the feasibility by covering all the 32 features, but also suggest that semantic roles, such as "Temporal", "Stakeholder", and "Instrument", emerge as the dominant categories conducive to eliciting environmental opposites.