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Ask HN: How do you keep track of software requirements and test them?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of software requirements and test them?

#41

Post by uticus »

alexashka wrote: post #22

As a junior dev, this isn't your job. Your job is to do what is being asked of you and not screw it up too much. If they wanted to track requirements, they'd already track them. People have very fragile egos - if you come in as a junior dev and start suggesting shit - they will not like that. If you come in as a senior dev and start suggesting shit, they'll not like it, unless your suggestion is 'how about I do your…

Sensing some sarcasm, but I agree there is some wisdom is "keeping your place." Not very popular to say that these days, but boy I wish I took that advice more as a junior dev. Still need to do that more.

However there is a spectrum, and if it turns from "listen rather than speak" in a respectful, learning sort of mentality to "shut up and do as I say, no questions", then requirements tools are not going to address the real problems.

In my experience, having requirements and processes and tools being used in a mindful way can be wonderful, but all that pales in comparison with the effectiveness of a well-working team. But that's the human factor and the difficult part.

Source: also been working a while. Seen good teams that were very democratic and also good teams that were very top-heavy militaristic (happy people all around in both scenarios).

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of software requirements and test them?

#42

Post by uticus »

Since you mention you're a junior dev, wanted to suggest taking the long road and (1) listening to what others say (you're already doing that by asking here, but don't overlook coworkers much closer to you) and (2) start reading on the subject. Might I suggest Eric Evans "Domain-driven design" as a starting point, and don't stop there? Reading is not a quick easy path, but you will benefit from those that have gone before you.

Of course, don't make the mistake I am guilty of sometimes making, and think you now know better than everyone else just because you've read some things others have not. Gain knowledge, but stay focused on loving the people around you. ("Loving" meaning in the Christian sense of respect, not being selfish, etc; sorry if that is obvious)

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of software requirements and test them?

#43

Post by drewcoo »

FrenchyJiby wrote: post #31

Having a similar discussion at work recently, I've written in favour of using Gherkin Features to gather high level requirements (and sometimes a bit of specifications), mostly stored in Jira Epics to clarify what's asked. See the post at https://jiby.tech/post/gherkin-features-user-requirements/ I made this into a series of post about gherkin, where I introduce people to Cucumber tooling and BDD ideals, and show an…

I have never met a dev who ever enjoyed Cucumber/Gherkin stuff. There's a lot of decorative overhead to make code look friendly to non-coders. Non-coders who eventually never look at the "pretty" code.

Spec-like BDD tests (RSpec, Jest, Spock, et al. - most languages except Python seem to have a good framework) have all the advantages of forcing behavioral thinking without having to maintain a layer of regex redirects.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of software requirements and test them?

#45

Post by drewcoo »

> I would like to track what the requirements/specifications are, and how we'll test to make sure they're met

Why? Why would you like that? Why you?

If it's not happening, the business doesn't care. Your company is clearly not in a tightly regulated industry. What does the business care about? Better to focus on that instead of struggling to become a QA engineer when the company didn't hire you for that.

Generally, if the team wants to start caring about that, agree to:

1. noting whatever needs to be tested in your tracker

2. writing tests for those things alongside the code changes

3. having code reviews include checking that the right tests were added, too

4. bonus points for making sure code coverage never drops (so no new untested code was introduced)

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of software requirements and test them?

#46

Post by robertlagrant »

5440 wrote: post #35

I review software for at least 3-5 companies per week as part of FDA submission packages. The FDA requirements require traceability between reqs and the validation. While many small companies just use excel spreadsheets for traceability, the majority of large companies seem to use JIRA tickets alongside confluence. While those arent the only methods, they seem to be 90% of the packages I review.

Health tech - we also use this combo. The Jira test management plugin XRay is pretty good if you need more traceability.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of software requirements and test them?

#47

Post by alexfromapex »

flyingfences wrote: post #28

In a safety-critical industry, requirements tracking is very important. At my current employer, all of our software has to be developed and verified in accordance with DO-178 [0]. We have a dedicated systems engineering team who develop the system requirements from which we, the software development team, develop the software requirements; we have a dedicated software verification team (separate from the development…

Just wanted to ask, this pretty much ensures you're doing waterfall development, as opposed to agile, right?

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of software requirements and test them?

#48

Post by michaelt »

uticus wrote: post #40
corpMaverick wrote: post #25

Let the product owner (PO) handle them. The PO has to make the hard decision about what to work on and when. He/She must understand the product deeply and be able to make the hard decisions. Also the PO should be able to test the system to accept the changes. Furthermore. You don't really need to have endless lists of requirements. The most important thing to know is what is the next thing that you have to work on.

This actually has a nugget of wisdom. I wish I was more open to soaking up wisdom - and less likely to argue a point - when I was a junior dev. Or still now, really. Moreover, if your PO can't define the goals, and what needs to be tested to get there, well you have a problem. Assuming the team is committed to some form of Agile and you have such a thing as a PO. However, I also disagree with the main thrust of this…

> Moreover, if your PO can't define the goals, and what needs to be tested to get there, well you have a problem.

In some work environments, there may be unspoken requirements, or requirements that the people who want the work done don't know they have.

For example, in an online shopping business the head of marketing wants to be able to allocate a free gift to every customer's first order. That's a nice simple business requirement, clearly expressed and straight from the user's mouth.

But there are a bunch of other requirements:

* If the gift item is out of stock, it should not appear as a missing item on the shipping manifest

* If every other item is out of stock, we should not send a shipment with only the gift.

* If we miss the gift from their first order, we should include it in their second order.

* The weight of an order should not include the gift when calculating the shipping charge for the customer, but should include it when printing the shipping label.

* If the first order the customer places is for a backordered item, and the second order they place will arrive before their 'first' order, the gift should be removed from the 'first' order and added to the 'second' order, unless the development cost of that feature is greater than $3000 in which case never mind.

* The customer should not be charged for the gift.

* If the gift item is also available for paid purchase, orders with a mix of gift and paid items should behave sensibly with regard to all the features above.

* Everything above should hold true even if the gift scheme is ended between the customer checking out and their order being dispatched.

* The system should be secure, not allowing hackers to get multiple free gifts, or to get arbitrary items for free.

* The software involved in this should not add more than, say, half a second to the checkout process. Ideally a lot less than that.

Who is responsible for turning the head of marketing's broad requirement into that list of many more, much narrower requirements?

Depending on the organisation it could be a business analyst, a product owner, a project manager, an engineer as part of planning the work, an engineer as part of the implementation, or just YOLO into production and wait for the unspoken requirements to appear as bug reports.

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of software requirements and test them?

#49

Post by vaseko »

disclosure: I'm involved in the product mentioned - https://reqview.com

Based on our experience with some heavyweight requirements management tools we tried to develop quite the opposite a simple requirements management tool. It is not open source but at least it has a open json format - good for git/svn, integration with Jira, ReqIF export/import, quick definition of requirements, attributes, links and various views. See https://reqview.com

Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of software requirements and test them?

#50

Post by The_rationalist »

robertlagrant wrote: post #46
5440 wrote: post #35

I review software for at least 3-5 companies per week as part of FDA submission packages. The FDA requirements require traceability between reqs and the validation. While many small companies just use excel spreadsheets for traceability, the majority of large companies seem to use JIRA tickets alongside confluence. While those arent the only methods, they seem to be 90% of the packages I review.

Health tech - we also use this combo. The Jira test management plugin XRay is pretty good if you need more traceability.

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