requirements

Cartoon showing a customer's request for a tree swing A Tester’s Role in Requirements Exploration

Agile is supposed to get people to talk to each other in real time. However, many teams still lack a shared understanding of what they are going to build, even as they start coding. As testers, we can explore feature specifications early, contributing to successful and timely delivery through defined requirements.

Janet Gregory's picture
Janet Gregory
Sheet of paper outlining software requirements Improving Requirements with Preemptive Testing

Most product defects are created during requirements definition. To significantly reduce and prevent requirements problems, consider making their management your software testers' responsibility. They can identify requirements defects as they are being developed, as well as work out mitigations for their root causes.

David Gelperin's picture
David Gelperin
group at table The World Has Product Ideas—and So Can You

From where do organizations—both big and small—get product ideas? Most often, pioneers and revolution makers have ideas that are homegrown, but today the market is such that the world has ideas. Our industry has plenty of patterns, trends, and ideas to work on and augment.

Mukesh Sharma's picture
Mukesh Sharma
A list of requirements with checkmarks Testing the Requirements: A Guide to Requirements Analysis

Everyone knows testing requirements is important, and everyone says they do it, but it seems like no one knows exactly how. The best way to solve this problem is to introduce a requirements analysis stage that has to be done before coding starts. No one knows a product as well as a tester who works with it every day!

Evgeny Tkachenko's picture
Evgeny Tkachenko
Illustration of minimum viable product with cars Interface Grief: Is It Agile, or Just Bad Software Engineering?

There are people who will use "being agile" to justify software engineering practices that could be perceived as lazy or even bad. The specifications are going to change, they say, so it would be a waste to engineer more to begin with than the minimum viable product. What's expediency and what's just poor practice?

Payson Hall's picture
Payson Hall
User stories Use Continuous Backlog Grooming to Refine Agile Requirements

Continuous backlog grooming means systematically refining your user stories: breaking up larger stories, obtaining detailed requirements, writing the requirements in terms of acceptance criteria and acceptance tests, and sharing and refining these details with the team. Acceptance test-driven development can help.

Susan Brockley's picture
Susan Brockley
Acceleration Build the Right Things and Build Them Fast: Accelerate the Continuous Delivery Pipeline

When most people think about continuous delivery, they think of improving the build-test-deploy-operate cycle. They don’t think about how to improve the intake process. Ensuring that quality is built into the application—not tested for after the fact—is the key to achieving accelerated continuous delivery.

Alex Martins's picture
Alex Martins
Why Is Estimating Software Testing Time So Difficult?

Management loves to ask testers to estimate how long their efforts will take. But so many important factors elude measurement that it makes it difficult to predict. If you need to explain why estimation is so tough, here are nine factors that significantly influence our ability to estimate testing time.

Lee Copeland's picture
Lee Copeland