On the role of environment assertions in requirements engineering and testing

Software developers dedicate a major portion of their development effort towards testing and quality assurance (QA) activities, especially during and around the implementation phase. Nevertheless, we continue to see an alarmingly increasing trend in the cost and consequences of software failure. In an attempt to mitigate such loss and address software issues at a much earlier stage, researchers have recently emphasized on the successful coordination of requirements engineering and testing (RET). Jackson points out that requirements reside in the environment which is comprised of certain phenomena, also known as environment assertions, and a large number of software issues stem from faulty environment assertions. Current literature doesn’t provide any explicit emphasis on the environment assertions during QA activities. In order to address this gap, in this thesis, we present a detailed empirical study on the prominence of environment assertions in RBT and further propose an automated support to capture environment assertions