Applying a Systematic Approach to Link Requirements and Testing: A Case Study

Requirements engineering and testing offer two complementary views of system development, and can, therefore, benefit from each other. This paper describes the lessons Metso learned from jointly improving requirements and testing processes. The goal of the process improvement was to increase the quality of R&D work. The new requirements and testing processes were piloted in an R&D project. The usage of the new processes removed the risk of doing double work, improved the visibility of the project status and the effectiveness of the project. The experiences of the pilot project suggest that the good results were mainly due to linking requirements and testing concurrently at process, people, and practice levels. It was essential that the new requirements and testing processes were integrated throughout the entire R&D project. In order to integrate the requirements and testing activities, critical roles and responsibilities were defined. Furthermore, we identified a set of good practices that helped perform the new processes.