Madrid, Spain and Bowie, MD, February 27, 2012 — Visure Solutions, the market leader in Requirements Engineering, has integrated test management into its IRQA requirements engineering solution. By including testing in the requirements matrix, Visure sets itself apart from other requirements management solutions, which stop short of proving requirement validation. With this addition to IRQA, developers of safety- and mission-critical software can automate full end-to-end requirements traceability, with fulfilled tests providing the proof points needed for regulatory certification.
Although regulations mandate that software requirements should be bidirectionally traceable to test results, most software developers use requirements tools and test suites that are disconnected from each other. In such a development environment, the results of testing must be manually traced back to the original requirements — a task often laboriously managed using Word or Excel. The dramatic increase in software complexity has made such time-consuming, error-prone manual tracking methods impossible to manage. Visure’s new Test Management Extension links specific tests with the requirements they validate. It then manages the relationships, identifying which requirements have and have not been tested and pinpointing those tests that need to be rerun due to changes in the requirements. This automates the manual process, saving time, increasing software quality, and providing the transparency required to obtain certification.
“Many of our customers feel overwhelmed by the burden of manually managing traceability,” confirmed Fernando Valera, IRQA Product Manager of Visure Solutions. “By bringing requirements and test management together, we provide a transparent, traceable loop that demonstrates through the test results how the organization has transformed the original requirements into a high-quality final solution. This ease of use provides enormous relief for engineers currently managing the validation process by hand.”
The Test Management Extension builds upon IRQA’s ability to create test plans. Development and test engineers create specific test sessions from the test plan, selecting which tests to perform for a given session. The test engineer then decides which tests will be run manually and which ones automatically. For the manual tests, the test engineer will be able to enter the results, screenshots and any required evidence directly in the tool, or import them from MS Excel or Word. For the automatic execution of the tests, the test engineer can write test scripts based upon a template, and the selected tests are automatically executed, linking to any test engine through the scripting language. On completion, the test results are automatically parsed and brought into IRQA, where the link between the results and the original requirements provides the necessary compliance transparency.
Valera added, “IRQA helps to generate robust requirements by analyzing the requirements semantics and reporting on their quality through the IRQA Quality Analyzer. By proving that the tests fulfill those requirements, developers get exactly what they need for certification.”
The Test Management Extension can interact with any test environment that supports Python scripting from the command line, such as IBM Rational Functional and Performance Tester, HP LoadRunner, Microfocus Silk family and Selenium. Legacy requirements and test results can also be imported to leverage requirements and test efforts already undertaken either manually or in other tools.
A demonstration of Visure Solutions’ Test Management Extension will be available in Hall 4, Stand 418 at Embedded World 2012 from February 28 to March 1 in Nürnberg, Germany. Almudena Díez, Senior Consultant at Visure Solutions, together with Brim Lubos, iFEST, Masaryk University Brno, will present a technical paper on “A Study of Challenges and Practices of the Requirements Engineering and Analysis Discipline within the Embedded Systems Domain,” on February 29, in Session 4, at 10:00 a.m.
About Visure
Visure Solutions, The Requirements Company, is the market leader in Requirements Engineering. Through its IRQA platform, Visure offers specialized and innovative solutions for requirements engineering that enables its customers to develop the highest-quality products, systems and services. IRQA’s quality and state-of-the-art features are endorsed by the world’s leading organizations. Visure’s team has deep and wide-ranging experience in the development and implementation of requirements solutions.