A Qualitative Study on using GuideGen to Keep Requirements and Acceptance Tests Aligned

Abstract

Software requirements constantly change, thus impacting all other artifacts of an evolving system. In order to keep the system in a consistent state, changes in requirements should be documented and applied accordingly to all affected artifacts, including acceptance tests. In practice, however, changes in requirements are not always documented nor applied to the affected acceptance tests. This is mostly due to poor communication, lack of time or work overload, and eventually leads to project delays, unintended costs and unsatisfied customers. GuideGen is a tool-supported approach for keeping requirements and acceptance tests aligned. When a requirement is changed, GuideGen automatically generates guidance in natural language on how to modify impacted acceptance tests and communicates this information to the concerned parties. In this paper, we evaluate GuideGen in terms of its perceived usefulness for practitioners and its applicability to real software projects. The evaluation was conducted via interviews with 23 industrial practitioners from ten companies based in Europe. The results indicate that GuideGen is a useful approach that facilitates requirements change management and the communication of changes between requirements and test engineers. The participants also identified potential for improvement, in particular for using GuideGen in large projects.

GuideGen: An approach for keeping requirements and acceptance tests aligned via automatically generated guidance

“…From these ten companies we interviewed twenty-three requirements and test(QA) engineers with at least five years of experience. For more details about the participants and their teams please refer to [8] .…”

“…It provides a comprehensive description of GuideGen: the approach, the tool and two evaluations. To achieve this, we also include some material from three other publications about GuideGen [7][8][9] .…”

“…First we present the improvements of GuideGen that we made based on the feedback received from the two evaluations described in [6,8] :…”

“…7 is shown that test engineers cannot add a test case without any related requirement, as there is no button for adding an acceptance test. The usual practice is that new acceptance tests are added only after the requirements are added [8] , [2] and, therefore, we followed this concept in GuideGen.…”

“…In this section, we briefly describe the study and summarize the main results, while the details are described in [8] .…”