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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?
#52In 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?
If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
~ Gerald Weinberg (1933-10-27 age:84) Weinberg’s Second Law
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of software requirements and test them?
#53In 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?
Not sure about how parent concretely operates. But there's no reason you cannot do Agile this way.
Agile iteration is just as much about how you carve up work as how you decide what to do next. For example you could break up a task into cases it handles.
> WidgetX handles foobar in main case
> WidgetX handles foobar when exception case arises (More Foo, than Bar)
> WidgetX works like when zero WidgetY present
Those could be 3 separate iterations on the same software, fully tested and integrated individually, and accumulated over time. And the feedback loop could come internally as in "How does it function amongst all the other requirements?", "How is it contributing to problems achieving that goal?"
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of software requirements and test them?
#54In 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?
Big waterfalls, yes.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of software requirements and test them?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just wanted to ask, this pretty much ensures you're doing waterfall development, as opposed to agile, right?
If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization. ~ Gerald Weinberg (1933-10-27 age:84) Weinberg’s Second Law https://www.mindprod.com/jgloss/unmain.html
> If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, we’d have progressed from wattle-and-daub through wood and reinforced concrete to molecular nanotechnology construction in the first two generations of humans building occupied structures.
Bad analogy is bad because programs and buildings aren't remotely similar or comparable.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of software requirements and test them?
#56In 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?
Waterfall is a great methodology where warranted. It ensures you're doing things in a principled, predictable, repeatable manner. We see all this stuff lamenting about and trying to implement reproducibility in science and build systems, yet seem to embrace chaos in certain types of engineering practices.
We largely used waterfall in GEOINT and I think it was a great match and our processes started to break down and fail when the government started to insist we embrace Agile methodologies to emulate commercial best practices. Software capabilities of ground processing systems are at least somewhat intrinsically coupled to the hardware capabilities of the sensor platforms, and those are known and planned years in advance and effectively immutable once a vehicle is in orbit. The algorithmic capabilities are largely dictated by physics, not by user feedback When user feedback is critical, i.e. UI components, by all means, be Agile. But if you're developing something like the control software for a thruster system, and the physical capabilities and limitations of the thruster system are known in advance and not subject to user feedback, use waterfall. You have hard requirements, so don't pretend you don't.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of software requirements and test them?
#57Even in the strictest settings, documentation has a shelf life. I don't trust anything that's not a test.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of software requirements and test them?
#58Let 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 is a LOT to put on a PO. I hope they have help.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of software requirements and test them?
#59As 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…
Well so the reason I asked this questions is that I did screw up a bit, and I think it could have been caught had I done sufficient testing - but I didn't because it doesn't seem to be part of the culture here, and neither are peer reviews.
So I _was_ trying to do only what was asked of me, just writing the code, but I guess I thought what I did at my previous job could have helped - which is keeping track of what was needed and then how I planned to accomplish and test.
But yeah, you've got me thinking about how or whether I should broach this topic; I think my lead is great, seems open to ideas, wants things to work well, so maybe I'll just ask what they think about how to avoid these kinds of mistakes.
Re: Ask HN: How do you keep track of software requirements and test them?
#60I 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.
Exactly the same process for us, also in healthcare and medical devices.