Quality Requirements: Succeeding with Waterfall Releases

While there is much excitement surrounding agile, many complex or outsourced projects do not fare well under agile. In these situations, requirements and architectural design cannot emerge with the software; they need to be defined and documented before coding starts. Filip Szymanski explores important practices in waterfall projects to help ensure requirements quality while speeding up development. First, Filip explains how to speed up waterfall releases by fully engaging QA/test teams in the requirements process. QA/testers can ensure that requirements are testable and validated throughout the release and further accelerate testing by writing requirements-based test cases in parallel with development. In addition, testers can begin test efforts sooner by automating application interfaces below the GUI. Then, Filip explores metrics-including test coverage of requirements, defect injection rate, and defect density-to track the requirements quality and release risk. Finally, Filip describes how linking requirements to code enables more accurate change impact analysis for better decision-making and more efficient testing.