Aligning Requirements with Verification & Validation for Software Engineering Process Improvement
Durga D. Poudel · ePublications at Regis University (Regis University) · 2018
Coordination between different phases of the Software Development Life Cycle is critical for success of any development projects. Particularly, effective alignment of requirements with verification and validation process helps to provide building blocks to the process that produce a quality product that meets customer expectations. Modern software development process strives to be more responsive by promoting tight collaboration between different people and teams. It is therefore, more important than ever to realize the importance of coordinated functioning requirements and testing phases. Lack of alignment between different phases can lead to wasted efforts in building right software that meets customer needs. This thesis highlights the current challenges in requirements engineering and testing processes and recommends measures for better alignment of requirements analysis with verification and validation. The paper underscores the findings of research that involved different data sources from the industry and academia. The research is derived from the study of data collected from 9 interviews of active software development practitioners, 7 white papers published by large scale software technology organizations, and 7 academic journals available on the research topic. Ambiguous and incomplete requirements were found to be the major problems in software development projects while effective collaboration and cooperation between teams were found to be the most important aspects in improving alignment between requirements and testing. The findings provide insights to common challenges in establishing strong link between different phases of software development process and how these challenges can be overcome for process improvement.