Modern software development approaches like Agile support a strong collaboration between all member of the software development team, software testers and business analysts included. Even if you don’t use a method like Behavior-Driven Development or Specification by Example, checking the fact that you will be able to actually test your requirements is a good thing. In his article, Richard Ellison share some best practices to reviewing requirements for testability from the point of view of a software tester.

Techne is an abstract requirements modeling language that lays formal foundations for new modeling languages applicable during early phases of the requirements engineering process. During these phases, the requirements problem for the system-to-be is being structured, its candidate solutions described and compared in terms of how desirable they are to stakeholders.

User stories are a technique taken from the agile development playbook that can easily be applied in traditional systems development and maintenance. User stories help you document needs in a structured way, from the users’ perspective. They’re a good basis for test cases, so as to support integrated requirements management and testing. In this article, you’ll find concrete advice based on our own experiences developing the requirements and testing tool ReQtest for how you can make user stories the basis for requirements management and testing.

This article is an extract of the “Complete Systems Analysis” written by James and Suzanne Robertson. It explains the basics of analysis models and emphasize that the important thing to remember is that modeling tools are complementary. Each shows one aspect of the system. Together, they make a complete working model of the system.

In this article, Trent Wong discusses how well the Business Analyst’s role is defined in organization. He starts by saying that the Business Analyst is a key success factor for software development projects. You need him to getting the requirements list properly, effectively communicating them to management and translating the requirements so the developers can build the application.

The common wisdom is that Agile register requirements using the user stories format: “”As a , I want <goal/desire> so that “. In this article, Earl Beede explains why user stories are not requirements.

The power of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is in its ability to enable business agility through business process integration and reuse. SoaML (Service-Oriented Architecture Modeling Language) is an Object Management Group (OMG) standard that is intended to help realize the potential of SOA.

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a modeling language standardized by the Object Management Group (OMG) used to manage requirements in software development projects. IDEF, the acronym for Integration DEFinition, refers to a family of modeling languages in the field of systems and software engineering.

Acceptance tests and requirements are linked. You can’t have one without the other. The tests clarify and amplify the requirements. A test that fails shows that the system does not properly implement a requirement. A test that passes is a specification of how the system works.

Value-based software engineering (VBSE) is an approach that take into account the fact that software has a major influence on most systems’ cost, schedule, and value. Software decisions are inextricably intertwined with system-level decisions. In this article, Barry Boehm discusses the basic principles of value-based software engineering and explains why value-neutral methods are insufficient as a basis of a software engineering discipline.