An intentional scenario-based approach for testing software requirements specifications

Software Requirement Specifications (SRS) provide a complete description of the software functionality, behavior and its constraints. Most bugs in software are due to incomplete or inaccurate software requirements. Testing SRS can identify the requirement conflictions and ambiguities and ensure the delivery of software which meets and satisfies the user requirements. The aim of the present study is to propose and implement an approach for testing SRS. The approach validates user requirement specifications against requirements specifications extracted from the corresponding ready software and produce a testing report. This study reports the development of the semi-automated SRS toolset that implements the proposed approach. This approach was formalized using MAP formalism which is a process model based on a non-deterministic ordering of goals and strategies. The SRS testing toolset extracts requirement specifications from the implemented software chosen to be an XML schema and compares them with SRSs from the user's perspective that are collected through a set of forms. Such toolset is expected to produce an informative validation report that indicates the degree of matching between the specifications and user requirements. To test the implemented tool, an input test case can be put which is an XML Schema sample and the corresponding user requirements specifications. The specifications for each test case are extracted manually and written out. Depending on the limitation of time, the number of test cases to be run will be three test cases; with complete entities, attributes and relationships, with some mismatches, with some mismatches but relationships.