Welcome to the Silverpath Spotlight, an e-newsletter from Silverpath Technologies that discusses how to get more out of your testing efforts and highlights company news. If you have queries or article ideas, email us through our website.
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Silverpath Increases Team Function
Want to get more out of your current test team and improve quality at the same time? Establishing the fertile ground for growing high performance test teams can be difficult, but a sustained commitment to driving improvements in this key area can help optimize the Total Cost of Quality. Through our focused consulting and training services, Silverpath can rapidly improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your test team. |
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Feature Article: Communicating Requirements To Testing - You're Going To Be In Pictures!
How do you know what a system is supposed to do and what it is not supposed to do? Formal requirements are intended to create an easily validated, maintainable and comprehensive set of documents communicating the system's planned functional scope in terms of tasks and behaviours. It is well understood that a higher quality product demands a higher upfront investment. However, compromises regarding quality versus cost are made every day and tight project budgets and short timelines often greatly reduce the interest in formalized documentation, requirements or otherwise. "The communication of functional requirements and specifications is the most difficult, critical, and error-prone task in IT projects. Research has shown that projects that proceed to the construction and coding phase with missing or wrong functional requirements and specifications are almost certain to fail." – Bill Walton, A Systematic Approach for More Effective Communication of Functional Requirements and Specifications. In the fast-paced changing world of software development there is a continuous challenge to communicate the expectations for the system and its internally and externally facing behaviours. Formal, documented requirements often suffer because of the challenges of keeping up with short iterative project life-cycles, continually evolving product scope and customer demands, and uncertain or changing screens and interfaces. Without clearly stated requirements, testing, specifically, is unable to perform its job of both verifying that the system was implemented correctly and validating that the correct system was implemented. A balanced approach that maximizes the contribution of the organization's available resources within the project constraints is required. The following proven light-weight solution tailored to your timeframes and resource realities can allow testing to, in the absence of complete formal requirements, capture critical information about the system without slowing development. The resulting artifacts can also serve as a direct input into testing activities.
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About Silverpath Technologies
Silverpath Technologies provides results-centric consulting and training services targeted at improving the effectiveness and efficiency of quality and testing activities across the software development lifecycle through the application or modification of processes, techniques and tools. For more information, visit http://www.silverpath.com. |
