distributedlife

It can be too easy for testers and developers to miss requirements when they are embedded within the definition of a different requirement. If there is more than one requirement for a particular aspect of a system, screen widget or label. Create a second requirement.

Why is this important?

• Developers and Testers can miss requirement
• You lose traceability between your requirements, the code, test cases and defects.
• Versioning requirements becomes difficult because each change request impacts multiple requirements which impacts a greater number of tests

Take this stunning example:

This should be:

1. On Hover – A ‘rollover’ effect applies which is defined as …

2. On Click – A ‘selected’ state is applied to the relevant menu item. This is defined as …

3. Menu items are to be sorted alphabetically

4. Menu Items are in sentence case

It’s a fairly trivial example but it illustrates how easy it is slip into non-formal English language when defining requirements. Requirements are formal, they need to be explicit.

A quick and easy way to check if you have too many expectations defined per requirement is to check for any joining words like ‘and’. If you have a requirement and another one, you can be confident that there are two requirements defined.