Linking Requirements and Testing in Practice

An increasing number of organizations are interested in binding requirements and testing more closely together. Based on a series of practitioner interviews conducted in five Finnish organizations, this paper presents a set of good practices that can be applied to create a stronger link between requirements engineering and testing. These practices include early tester participation particularly in requirements reviews, setting up traceability policies, taking feature requests from testers into account, and linking testing personnel with requirement owners. Due to reported hardships in implementing complete test traceability to requirements, communication links between testers and requirement owners are suggested in order to overcome the deficiencies of document links.