Static Testing Requirements

The testing process should begin early in the application development life cycle, not just at the traditional testing phase at the end of coding. Testing should be integrated with the application development phases.

During the requirements phase of the software development life cycle, the business requirements are defined on a high level and are the basis of the subsequent phases and the final implementation. Testing in its broadest sense commences during the requirements phase, which increases the probability of developing a quality system based on the user's expectations. The result is that the requirements are verified to be correct and complete. Unfortunately, more often than not, poor requirements are produced at the expense of the application. Poor requirements ripple down the waterfall and result in a product that does not meet the user's expectations. Some characteristics of poor requirements include the following:

* Partial set of functions defined
* Performance not considered
* Ambiguous requirements
* Security not defined
* Interfaces not documented
* Erroneous and redundant requirements
* Requirements too restrictive
* Contradictory requirements

Requirements phase and acceptance testing

Functionality is the most important part of the specification and should include a hierarchic decomposition of the functions. The reason for this is that it provides a description that is described in levels to enable all the reviewers to read as much detail as needed. Specifically, this will make the task of translating the specification to test requirements much easier.

Another important element of the requirements specification is the data description. It should contain details such as whether the database is relational or hierarchical. If it is hierarchical, a good representation is a data model or entity relationship diagram in terms of entities, attributes, and relationships.

Another section in the requirements should be a description of the interfaces between the system and external entities that interact with the system, such as users, external software, or external hardware. A description of how users will interact with the system should be included. This would include the form of the interface and the technical capabilities of the users.

During the requirements phase, the testing organization needs to perform two functions simultaneously. It needs to build the system/acceptance test plan and also verify the requirements. The requirements verification entails ensuring the correctness and completeness of the documentation prepared by the development team.