This post was most recently updated on June 17th, 2019
Objective
The main objective of early involvement of testing team in the requirement phase is to prevent the defects in requirements. Otherwise these defects will be passed on to the design and coding phases. When the application comes to testing it becomes expensive to fix these defects as these are incorporated from the requirement phase itself. So this will consume more time, the delivery of the application within the deadline will not be achieved and moreover the cost will go higher than the planned one. Hence once the requirements gathering is completed, testing team should be involved in the requirement phase.
Role of testing team in Requirement phase
- Thoroughly understand the requirements from the requirement owner.
- Discuss and analyze the requirements for correctness and completeness within the team.
- Register the queries for incomplete/ambiguous requirements & get answers for them.
- Discuss with developers/go through their understanding document.
- Prepare the understanding document on the requirements.
- For any differences in understanding, discuss with Requirement owner/Developer in order to sync up with all with the same understanding.
- Get the understanding document approved from the requirement owner.
- When there are change requests, analyze the impact on the current requirement and communicate to the requirement owner about possible issues if any.
- Keep all the requirement documents in the organized folder as the requirements can be received in files, emails, etc. Keep the documents updated along with the old documents to keep track of the changes.
Benefits
Early involvement of testing team in requirement phase has below mentioned benefits.
- Requirement defects are detected in the requirement phase itself.
- Requirement defects are prevented from passing on to design and coding phase.
- Detecting the requirement defects and solving them in requirement phase will save time, cost & improves the application quality.
- Deliverables will be successfully achieved in the predefined timeline.
