Software Testing

Laboratory Work No.1

Topic: Establishment of requirements for a specific project

Overview

The software development world is a really interesting one. One the other hand - event if things seem to look great, it is not that easy to develop a project. Moreover, it becomes really difficult and annoying when the project grows. One team might even find out that all the work that was done needs to be changed drastically. Some new functionalities ca be conflicting with what was thought at the beginning. In order to avoid these kind of situations, a team will be interesting in finding out as much as possible information regarding the project, about the customer’s needs. By identifying the needs, we strive to understand as much as possible about the users, as well as their work and the context of their work. We should take into account that system under development should support users in achieving their goals.

Just after finding out what the customer’s needs are - a project can be started to be analyzed, and requirements can be, step by step, established. What we actually do is building upon the needs identified a set of requirements.

While establishing the requirements, we will use a user centered approach.

A user-centered approached to development:

• Study that investigated the causes of IT project failure found that “requirements definition” was the most frequently cited project stage that caused failure.
• Understanding what the product should do and making sure it meets the stakeholders’ needs are absolutely critical to the success of the product.

But before proceeding to the laboratory work task, what are requirements ?

After analyzing several resources, I found out:
A requirement is a statement that specifies what an intended product should do, or how it should perform.

Traditionally, two types of requirements:

1. Functional requirements specify what the system should do.
2. Non-Functional requirements specify what constraints there are on the system or its development.

Also, interaction design requires us to understand both the functionality required and the constraints for development or operation of the product.
The following diagram categorizes the requirements in several parts:

Work process

During the first laboratory work, we were provided with two main tasks:

1. To generate an idea, and, by collaborating with another team, to express them our needs.
2. To establish requirements of another team’s project and their needs.

The process was very interesting. On the other hand, we did not go deep into the requirements the customer needs. But still, we’ve come up with a brief representation of how our requirements model looks like:

requirement 1
requirement 2
requirement 3

Conclusion:

Whether the task was done correctly, one thing is clear: it seemed to be much more simple. When we were provided with the task - situation changed. It turns out that it is not easy at all. And it is way more complicated than it might appear. Since the task was performed, these are the main things that, in my opinion, shouldn’t be forgotten:

• Getting the requirements right is crucial to the success of the interactive product.
• There are different types of requirements:
  1. Functional, data, environmental, user and usability.
  2. Every system will have requirements under each of these headings.
  
  
• Most commonly used data-gathering techniques for establishing requirements include:
  Questionnaires, interviews, workshops or focus groups, naturalistic observation, and studying documentation.
• Describing user tasks such as scenarios, use cases and essential use cases can help to articulate existing user work practices.
  They also help to express envisioned use for new devices.
• Task analysis techniques help to investigate an existing situation, i.e. existing systems and current practices.