Aligning requirements and testing through metamodeling and patterns: design and evaluation

Area of Science:

• Software Engineering
• Metamodeling
• Requirements Engineering

Background:

• Poor requirements engineering impacts project quality, budget, and schedule.
• Requirement patterns facilitate reuse but lack integration beyond engineering.
• Weak alignment between requirements and testing causes cost, rework, and delays.

Purpose of the Study:

• To present a novel metamodeling approach, Software Pattern MetaModel (SoPaMM).
• To align requirements and testing using requirement patterns and test patterns.
• To evaluate SoPaMM's quality properties.

Main Methods:

• Developed SoPaMM, a metamodeling approach integrating requirement and test patterns.
• Described functional requirement patterns and acceptance test patterns as user stories with executable behaviors.
• Evaluated SoPaMM against a metamodel quality evaluation framework.

Main Results:

• SoPaMM successfully aligns requirements and testing through integrated patterns.
• The approach enhances requirement specifications and professional productivity.
• Evaluation results demonstrate SoPaMM's quality properties.

Conclusions:

• SoPaMM offers a promising solution for aligning software requirements and testing.
• The metamodeling approach facilitates reuse and mitigates project risks.
• Lessons learned from design and evaluation provide insights for future research.