Requirements

Requirements are documents describing features and capabilities a product should have. They are essential for successful implementation of any software solution as they represent the needs of end users and therefore drive the development. Requirements are also the foundation of tests designed to verify the software and that’s why they play an important role in test management.

Define

TestFLO allows to define any issue type in any project as requirements for each test management project. Depending on the development process used in a project, different issue types can be selected as requirements. For example, when using Scrum framework, Stories and Epics would probably be a good choice for requirements issues. Projects managed in other frameworks or methodologies (e.g. waterfall) might use New feature, Improvement or Task issue type to track requirements. The choice depends on internal processes and individual needs.

Link with tests

Requirements provide informations used to create tests. Test Case Template being a test specification can be linked with a requirement to establish the traceability between these objects. The requirement issue shows all Test Case Templates related with it and one can evaluate the tests designed for this particular requirement. Test Case Templates also have the information about the issue they test.

Going further, creating Test Cases from the Test Case Templates automatically populates the information about the requirement. All Test Cases linked to a requirement are shown on its view, so that the test execution for a particular requirement can be easily analyzed.

Link with Test Plans

Requirements can be linked not only with Test Case Templates and Test Cases, but also with whole sets of Test Cases - Test Plans. It’s especially effective when a single Test Plan tests only one requirement. You can easily track the overall test execution progress for this requirement directly on its view.

Linking many requirements to a Test Plan also makes sense. The requirement stores the information about the Test Plan and it can be used as a reference to see where this particular requirement is tested.

Another way of linking Test Plans to requirements is to link the high level requirements with Test Plans and lower level requirements related with high level ones with tests. For example, in Scrum projects, it might be a good idea to link your Epics with Test Plans and Stories with Test Case Templates/Test Cases. This solution creates a logical structure of tests and requirements.

Track defects

Defects created from Test Cases linked with requirements are also linked with these requirements. This is highly beneficial as it’s easy to evaluate all the defects gathered directly on requirement issues. One can see if a requirement has any critical bugs or if all the bugs related with the requirement are resolved.

Use reports

Defining requirements has another major advantage - it makes requirements reports available. These reports can be used to deep dive into requirements analysis in the testing context. They show informations about the coverage, traceability and test executions taking requirements into account.