Treating NFR as First Grade for Its Testability

Pratima Singh, Anil Kumar Tripathi

Department of Computer Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (Banaras Hindu University), Varanasi, India..

DOI: 10.4236/jsea.2012.512114                

Abstract

Practitioners and researchers in the field of software engineering have realized that Non Functional requirement have not received due attention and second grade (or no) treatment has been meted out to Non Functional Requirements. Many software products/systems are finally not acceptable because of such an approach. This casual approach of treating NFR has moved on to Testing also. Testing of NFR has never been taken seriously. Here in this work, we attempt to under- stand what needs to be done for proper consideration of NFR, so that they are treated as seriously as the Functional Requirements. In an attempt to treat NFR as seriously as FR we work on the testability of NFR by refining an abstract quality concern into concrete NFR statements. We show that quality concerns needs to be analyzed, for identifying and finally converting them into appropriate and unambiguous NFR. Once a high quality of NFR is ensured then the consequent testing of these NFRs will become as effective as that of Functional Requirement. We finally propose a revised model of Problem Analysis and Requirement Specification. A step wise refinement model for quality concern into test- able Non Functional Requirement is also proposed.

Keywords

Non Functional Requirements (NFR); Testability; Requirement Analysis; Goal Refinement; Scenario Based Testing

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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