Sizing Software with Testable Requirements

1110 Words3 Pages

Title : Sizing Software with Testable Requirements

Article summary

Without measuring the cost the project cannot be managed. In order to size the project the testable requirements can be used . The Testable requirements implies a new software measurement paradigm. There are some attributes and applications which needs to be identified.

In the industry the sizing measures are generally used to normalize the different sizing measures ,hence it can be compared . Further without a sizing the project the productivity statistics cannot be obtained. There are other factors which would be attributes when sizing progress measurement, earned value, risk identification, and change management.

Mostly widely used sizing measures are lines of code (LOC) and function points (FP). LOC is a measured by the size of the system which regard to numbers of programming states involved. This is a high dependency with the technology which has been used to build the system. Contrary to LOC, function points (FP) is a measure of by the functionality of the system. It is very much independent of the technology which has been used to develop the system. The use of testable requirements is as follows. As per the definition of IEEE there are six different types of requirements: functional, design, implementation, interface, performance, and physical. For the purposes of sizing,

each type of these requirements must be considered and each should have the same measurement standards.

Once high level functional requirements are identified, it could be decomposed into granular / precise requirements. The precise requirement can be considered as testable requirement. A testable requirement should be able to tested by one or more test cases.

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...se requirement can be identified if the requirement can be tested by one or more test cases. This is a vague statement and need more clarity.

Overall the author has defined the testable requirements for sizing project well however it needs to be improved with more clarity and details.

Citation -:

1. Quality Assurance Institute,Establishing a Software Defect Management Process , Quality Assurance Institute Research Report #8, 1995. Auerbach Publications , © 2000 RC Press LLC

2. Wilson, P., Testable requirements — An alternative software sizing measure, Journal of the Quality Assurance Institute , October 1995, 3–11.

3. Jones, C., Applied Software Measurement , McGraw-Hill, New York, 1991.

4. Jones, C., Sizing up software, Scientific American , December 1998.

5. Chicago Quality Assurance Association presentation, November 22, 1996, Chicago, IL.

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