Evaluating Business Requirements

Course available as online self-paced

Course available to schedule for your team

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Applicable Certifications:

CSTP-P #5

Concepts

Most test courses deal with testing that developed software conforms to requirements. This course is different and identifies 21 ways to evaluate the requirements themselves. Poorly defined requirements cause up to two-thirds of software errors, yet few organizations know effective methods to assure requirements are accurate and complete. At most, they use one or two weak methods and don't recognize the weakness. Following the CAT-Scan Approach ™, in this interactive session participants apply 21 increasingly powerful techniques successively to a real case and discover how each different method reveals additional, otherwise-overlooked defects when they are easiest and least expensive to fix. Participants learn ways to find previously overlooked requirements, increase meaningful customer/user involvement, enhance communications and understanding, and truly test the adequacy of requirements definitions.

This course shows ways to evaluate adequacy of requirements which already have been collected - that they are accurate, clear, and complete. The course is not describing how to test that the delivered software meets the requirements. Nor is it intended to teach how to discover requirements, although the testing methods do suggest methods which would help discovery. Our companion course, Defining and Managing User Requirements , does concentrate on teaching how to discover, analyze, and document requirements.

Participants will learn:

More than 21 ways to test that business/user requirements are accurate and complete.
Finding previously overlooked problems when they are easiest and least expensive to fix.
Recognizing, communicating, and gaining commitment to the importance of adequate requirements.
Evaluating the levels of quality embodied within the requirements.
Testing techniques that enhance customers' involvement and communication with management.
Allocating testing resources economically.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND: This course has been designed for systems and business managers, project leaders, analysts, programmer analysts, quality/testing professionals, and auditors responsible for assuring the accuracy and completeness of business/customer requirements.

Outline

VALUE OF TESTING UP-FRONT
- Overcoming obstacles to improvement
- Role of requirements in system problems
- Big economic payoff of better requirements
- Proactive Testing Ô Life Cycle Model
- Survey on improving requirements quality
- Keys to effective testing
- Why up-front testing usually is so weak
- CAT-Scan Approach Ô secret to quality
TESTING REQUIREMENTS FORMATS
- The "Regular Way" we review requirements
- Hidden weaknesses of traditional methods
- Adding strength to subjective evaluations
- Formal technical review
- Inspection topics and standards
- Making sure they are requirements
- Assessing reviewability
- Determining deliverability
- Demonstrating testability
- Testing structural completeness and clarity
- Format for requirements deliverables
FINDING OVERLOOKED REQUIREMENTS
- What we mean by system quality
- Identifying all the stakeholders
- Detecting all three Quality Dimensions
- Design, Performance, Conformance needed
- Addressing relevant quality factors
- Candidate quality factor requirements
- Commonly overlooked deliverables
ASSURING ACCURACY/COMPLETENESS
- Checking importance and criticality
- Finding Engineered Deliverable QualityÔ
- Guidelines and conventions vs. IT standards
- Engineering standards to do a job well
- Ascertaining trade-off balances
- Simulation and prototyping
- Walking through requirements
- Joint Application Development (JAD)
- Defining acceptance criteria
- Matching to independent definitions
- Independent/expert validation
- Measuring the "proof of the pudding"