Roles and Responsibilities in REM - Requirements Engineering and Management for Software Development Projects - page 152

use on the Internet, most organizations are outsourcing the testing activity, so
much so, now there are many organizations specializing only in testing.
Requirements engineering in these projects is entirely different from other
projects. In other projects, the focus is on getting the end users to define their needs
comprehensively and document them in such way that software engineers can
develop the desired product. In testing projects, we need to ensure that the product
works as specified. The specifications are already available in URS, SRS and
possibly the design document. The requirements besides what is contained in the
URS and the SRS are the timelines that need to be adhered to for completing the
testing.
Then comes the designing of the test strategy, and developing the test cases.
Testers would carry out the testing using the test cases.
The need is to find out how the end users would use the product and simulate
that usage during testing to ensure that it works and works without defects. The
test case designer, if not the tester, ought to know the difference between the right
result and the wrong result. Therefore, the test case design is normally carried out
by functional specialists because they are best positioned to know if the product
covers the functionality comprehensively.
In some testing projects, there may not be any documentation in which case,
there is a need to elicit and gather testing requirements from the end users. If it
becomes necessary, then the requirements engineering is similar to that of full life
cycle software development projects.
Most organizations use functional specialists for requirements engineering and
test case design in testing projects. Fresh business graduates are also being used
with training on software testing. I think that using functional specialists is the
right approach.
11.2.2.4 Conversion/Porting/Migration Projects
In these projects, there already exists a working software product which needs to
either be converted or ported to another platform or migrated to a newer version of
the existing platform.
Conversion projects are like Y2 K or Euro conversion projects. The software
product is already working but needs to be converted to accommodate the year
2000 or Euro functionality.
When an application is moved from one hardware platform to another but using
the same programming language, we refer to those projects as porting projects.
The need is to adjust the code of the product to handle the specific differences
between both the platforms.
Migration projects involve shifting the application on the same hardware
platform but on to its next version of the software platform. The newer version
may have a few differences of syntax and may have some extra facilities too. So
the application needs adjustment to be able to handle the differences and make use
of the additional facilities provided by the newer version.