Aligning Requirements and Acceptance Tests via Automatically Generated Guidance

Abstract

Keeping requirements and acceptance test documents aligned and up-to-date plays an important role in the success of software projects. In practice, these documents are not always aligned with each other, nor with the actual system behaviour. A previous study showed that even when requirements are updated, acceptance tests might stay outdated, which often leads to quality problems and unintended costs. In order to keep the requirements and test documents in a consistent state, we are developing an approach that automatically generates guidance on how to change impacted acceptance tests when changes in requirements occur. In this paper, we briefly present our approach and a prototype tool that implements it. A preliminary evaluation of our approach yielded encouraging results.

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

“…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] .…”

Keeping Evolving Requirements and Acceptance Tests Aligned with Automatically Generated Guidance

“…In a previous paper [9] we presented the principal ideas of our approach together with some examples and a preliminary evaluation. In this paper we describe our method and the algorithms used in detail, give an overview of the GuideGen tool, and present the results of a thorough evaluation with real-world data.…”

GuideGen

“…In this paper, we focus on the main features of the tool and how they are used. The technical details as well as the evaluation of the GuideGen approach are described in [10] and [11]. We describe the main features of the tool in Section 2 and summarize the evaluation in Section 3.…”