There is little disagreement over the fact that quality requirements are important, even essential, to the success of software projects.  If we define project success as usable, working software, then it becomes quickly apparent that we need “good” requirements that reflect what the system should do.  This begs the question, what qualities make a requirement good?

Logically, a requirement should clearly identify a real and specific business need.  This is most easily ensured by having extensive user input during requirements gathering phases and close communication with business users for elaborations.  Changing requirements are a hallmark of agile development projects and a focus on requirement elaboration and clarification are key.

Captivate, Macromedia’s reincarnation of RoboDemo, is a powerful, easy-to-use tool for creating professional quality demos, interactive tutorials and handouts.  Its organization and usability are intuitive enough that I was quickly and easily able to produce a basic application simulation complete with auto-generated captions and narration.

The tool allows you to narrate while recording, add voice-overs/sound effects at the end or to synch background music in mp3 format to the “movie”.  Re-recording is kept to a minimum since all text boxes, mouse paths, audio recordings and display times for individual frames are editable.  Editing is simple since Captivate saves screen images as individual slides which can be manipulated in the edit view by dragging and dropping controls, superimposing outside images and setting slide properties.  Though I did not try this – apparently, you can seamlessly incorporate Power Point presentations into your project and save them in Flash format.  The edit view also contains a timeline which makes it easy to view the current slide in its context to the overall project and re-order, if desired.

In order to have a defect resolved efficiently, there are some guidelines for creating reports that are easy for developers to interpret and follow.  Bear in mind that your reports should contain information needed by developers (to fix the bug), managers (to assess risk and prioritize work) and fellow testers (to verify fixes and find out if known defects may be the source of current problems). 

1.                  Document immediately – modifications/details can always be added later

While scripted testing serves an important purpose and is often the preferred strategy, exploratory testing offers some worthwhile benefits in certain situations. If circumstances permit, a combination of scripted and unscripted testing can be ideal. Some valuable advantages of exploratory testing are:

• Ability to focus resources on targeted areas, i.e. recently changed/ambiguous code
• Tests can be quickly created and modified to isolate bugs
• Risk mitigated by exposing and documenting more defects than might be discovered through traditional scripted testing in a short time frame
• Process of pin-pointing defects often helps uncover potential workarounds