Working with Requirements

The first step to defining and developing your processes is to identify your test requirements. After you have your requirements identified and defined in Certify, then you will begin to create processes and link the requirements to your processes. As you run your processes, the requirement status will show if the requirement was fulfilled during execution.

Requirements are identified in one or more of the following ways:

Measuring the scope of the test effort
Interviewing application users
Performing a risk analysis
Using existing documented requirements

Organizing Test Requirements

After you have identified your requirements, then you will define your requirements in Certify. By organizing your research results into a hierarchy and adopting a naming convention for your requirements, you will ensure your requirements are easy to locate.

For example, you may want to include the application area and the task involved in the naming convention because this method will help you find the requirement through sorting the list alphabetically and narrowing the search. Also, it is easier to add a new requirement.

You can also organize your requirements by using your existing naming convention or requirement IDs from documented requirements. For example, the first part of the name might designate the sub-system, the second might designate the category, and the third part denotes a particular case or instance.

Linking Requirements to Processes

A key feature of requirements in Certify is the ability to link them to processes. Both the requirement and process must be created separately before they can be linked together. Requirements can be linked to multiple processes, and processes can be linked to multiple requirements.

No two requirements can have the same name at the same hierarchy level.

Requirement Status

After executing a process with linked requirements, the status of the requirements is shown in the Requirements window and Linked Requirements tab. The Requirement status is based on the execution results for the linked process that has been promoted to the Results of Record. For more information about the Results of Record, see Promoting a Result to a Result of Record.

Automatic requirement status updates are not only triggered by a Result of Record promotion, but also by the following events:

Adding a requirement as a child requirement
Linking a process to a requirement
Removing a link from a process to a requirement
Deleting a child requirement
Deleting a process