Are You Testing in the Right Direction?

October 29th, 2015 by Adam Sandman

requirements management software testing bug tracking

Over the years, we have had a couple of customers in the past struggle with using SpiraTest with their 'defect-centric' view of testing. SpiraTest was originally designed to follow a requirements-centric approach. A defect-centric approach isn't unreasonable per se, but many customers don't realize that they are even using this approach and wonder why SpiraTest works the way it does. This article is taken from a real customer 'eureka' moment and hopefully will help others in the same position.

After reading various best practice documents from various customers using Spira and reading the Spira manuals from top to bottom again, I now understand the disconnect. Our company follows a Defect-centric development and test process whereas SpiraTest is designed to be Requirements-centric. This is why we keep hollering that we need to group Defects in a release and generate test sets from Defects. This is probably also why you keep scratching your head. We don't care if requirements have been met or not. Our process ties together Defects and Features into a release and then runs test against them. The functional units have paired tests and then we look at Defect coverage instead of Requirements coverage.

So, where am I going with this diatribe? Well, just that I don't believe that there is a test tool on the market that follows a Defect-centric approach. This means that we go back to spreadsheets or learn to adapt. I am voting that we learn to adapt and adopt a Requirements-centric development and test approach. Our questions related to generating test sets based on defects and out frustration with the tools inability to handle hierarchical test sets (needed for paring tests) just evaporate.