QA Service: Identification of Bad Product Requirements

It is obvious that testing software that has poor requirements is an undesirable situation. It is the fallout of an ill-planned development process, which is often seen in small startups in the IT sector. If such situations are recurring then it can pose itself as a threat to the top software testing company’s reliability factor.

In such cases, a QA tester can prove to be a boon for such firms who can drastically improve the situation by applying best QA services and practices. The testing services offered by the best software testing companies are designed to work in favor of their clients. These companies try their best to understand what the requirements lack. They then go ahead with the testing phase, document the gaps and pass the information back to the development team for improvements in the code.

How product requirements go bad?
When software is coded based on bad requirements the results are far from desirable. Missing requirements mean that there is nothing documented with which a tester can go ahead and implement necessary performance improving elements. A missing requirement could be in the form of functionality that was overlooked or an error condition that was not thought of in advance by the development team.

The incomplete requirements situation can arise due to the following two reasons:

1. Expressing a requirement verbally leads to miscommunication
2. Unshared assumptions made by the author of the core code related to the requirements of the software

A product requirement can also go bad if the core code was written by multiple authors who did not communicate clearly with their team members. Such a situation can also result in the software reacting to only the input(s) made by a single user. If that is the case and if left unchecked, it can lead to undesirable and inconsistent results.

What to do as a QA official when the requirements go bad for a product?

Best QA companies always apply the ideal procedures which make them providers of best QA services. In the case of testing software with bad product requirements, one should abide by the following for best results:
It is advised to carry out the testing procedure which progresses leftward in the development process. It allows the tester to place themselves as close as they can to the people who authored the core code of the software in question. This works by letting the tester better understand the unwritten or missing requirements of the software. It works the best in cases where one needs to add a functionality in the core code as the domain knowledge is based on experience and fresh.

It is always advised to write an overall test plan and test cases in detail. These documents are of critical importance as they can contribute to enhancing both existing and new requirements. Through these written documents a tester can easily explain certain functions of the core code and their subsequent behaviors during the testing phase to the development team.