Getting more from requirements traceability: Requirements testing progress

Abstract

Requirements Engineering (RE) and Testing are important steps in many software development processes. It is critical to monitor the progress of the testing phase to allocate resources (person-power, time, computational resources) properly, and to make sure the prioritization of requirements are reflected during testing, i.e. more critical requirements are given higher priority and tested well. In this paper, we propose a new metric to help stakeholders monitor the progress of the testing phase from a requirements perspective, i.e. which requirements are tested adequately, and which ones insufficiently. Unlike existing progress related metrics, such as code coverage and MC/DC (modified condition/decision) coverage, this metric is on the requirements level, not source code level. We propose to automatically reverse engineer this metric from the existing test cases of a system. We also propose a method to evaluate this metric, and report the results of three case studies. On these case studies, our technique obtains results within 75.23% - 91.11% of the baseline on average.