Scenario-driven specification-based testing against goals and requirements

Abstract. We describe a new verification and validation (V&V) approach based on comparing actual system behavior in the form of captured goalannotated event traces, with expected behavior expressed by requirements scenarios with system requirements goals. We believe our proposed V&V approach can leverage requirements engineering work fruitfully and lead to improved software quality, by offering these six potential benefits: (1) higheryield testing, (2) distinguishing false positives, (3) defining test coverage metrics, (4) detecting domain-analysis errors, (5) validating top-level requirements, and (6) efficient control of retesting. We use examples to explain how our method can attain these benefits. If our goal/requirements-based V&V approach succeeds in realizing these six benefits, we believe it will lead to improved requirements that, in turn, can successfully improve software quality.