In this increasingly complex software development era, it is important to include testing as early in the project as possible. And that means starting with requirements gathering.
Requirement Analysis Process
A typical Requirement Analysis process should identify testable requirements through frequent interactions with various stakeholders (Clients, Business Analysts, Technical Leads etc.). The intent is to brainstorm and clarify any ambiguous requirements before getting to the next phase and to precisely define the testing needs for the project.
What is Requirement Analysis: It is the process of determining user expectations for a system under consideration. These should be quantifiable and detailed.
Serves as a foundation for test plans and project plan
Serves as an agreement between developer and customer
The process of making stated and unstated requirements clear
The process to validate requirements for completeness, unambiguity, and feasibility
For this, QA should be involved early on in this phase ensuring that issues are identified before they become defects, even before the completion of the technical design. This, in turn, saves considerable time and money.
Any lacunae in requirement analysis will have a huge bearing on project timelines, quality, and costs, and may become the sole reason for the project failure because the further you go into the STLC (Software Testing Life Cycle), the lesser the chances of the bug getting detected and fixed.
Here clearly we can see if the requirement analysis is not done in the early phase of the SDLC then its impact is huge to fix it in later phases. A few consequences of poor requirement analysis are incorrect feature delivery, poor product quality, several change controls to fix system flaws, extension of project deadlines etc. The more we delay in analysing the requirement more it costs which impacts project delivery and quality.
However, with the influx of new and disruptive technologies, analyzing and validating the testing requirements is not an easy task. Besides, a few typical challenges further complicate the requirement analysis process.
Common Challenges in Requirement Analysis
In the early stage of SDLC, the scope is not defined clearly
Many times there is an ambiguous understanding of processes
Communication between the project team and stakeholders plays an important role
Insufficient inputs from the customer leads to assumptions that are not accepted in UAT
Inconsistency within the single process in multiple users
Conflicting customer views
Frequent new requirements and changes to existing requirements
Role of QA
QA is involved in requirement analysis activity to ensure that the requirements identified by the BA and accepted by the customer are measurable. Also, this activity provides inputs to various stages of SDLC to identify the availability of resources, scheduling and testing preparation. Below are the activities QA need to perform.
Analyze every requirement from specification document, and use cases.
List down high-level scenarios.
Clarify queries and functionality from stakeholders.
Promote suggestions to implement the features or any logical issues.
Raise defects or clarification against the specification document.
Track the defect or clarification raised against the specification document.
Create high-level Test Scenarios.
Create a Traceability Matrix.
Outcome of the Requirement Analysis Phase
Requirement Understanding Document.
High-level scenarios.
High-level test strategy and testing applicability.
With all the mentioned techniques and checklist of requirement analysis, the Tester is ready to Sign off on the Requirement Analysis phase.
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