Three Criteria for Testing Software Requirements

The task force committee should consider the following three criteria while information gathering to test whether the proposed system meets the requirements:

Functional requirements:

The functional requirements refer to those attributes of the software which meet the requirements of the end users. The software manufacturing companies keep in mind the requirements of the target users while designing the software functionally. They add characteristics and technicalities to the software which make them useful to the consumers. The process of software manufacturing has three steps, the inputs, the process of making the software and the output. The input to the software consists of the attributes which are given to it while the output consists of the final software which the consumers use like the websites (Abrahamsson et al., 2017).

Technical requirements:

The next criterion which the task force team should judge while gathering information about software is whether it meets the technical requirements. The technical aspects of software decide whether they would be able to meet the functional requirements of the customers. A very important technical aspect of software is it should be able to run on the system of the end user (Tayntor, 2006). The technical aspects of software include hardware, the operating software and the network on which the software can run.  For example, if the operating parameters of a company mandate a specific system say, Mozilla Firefox should be mandatorily to surf the internet, the software packages which would be installed into the system of the company should be technologically compatible with Mozilla (Verner et al., 2014). Thus, technical requirements are very important criteria which task force members and software developing team need to consider judging whether the software satisfies the requirements of the consumers.

Vendor-related requirements:

The third important criterion which the task force members consider while testing software is vendor requirements. The vendors distribute the software in the market and make them available to the end customers. Thus, they play very significant role in making the software available to the customers and generating profits for the companies manufacturing the software packages (Tayntor, 2006). The companies take into account several parameters while selecting the vendors or distributors. The software packages are usually applicable for some consecutive years before the advanced versions are introduced into the market to replace the old software. The software manufacturing companies ensure that the vendors provide full support to their customers like after sale services to ensure continued usage of the software by them (Thüm et al., 2014). Secondly, the companies usually partners with financially and technically strong vendors which are capable of carrying out open innovation to bring about improvements in the software. The third vendor is that the vendors should be ethical and legally complying.

 It is very important for the task force to gather accurate information on the three aspects of software mentioned above because this information helps them to direct the companies to bring improvements in the software. This augmentation in the software creates value for the end customers which yield high return on the investments of the software manufacturing companies. Thus, gathering accurate information about the software packages are important for bringing about developments in them and also for the revenue generation of the companies making the software (Gousios, Pinzger & Deursen, 2014).

References:

Abrahamsson, P., Salo, O., Ronkainen, J., & Warsta, J. (2017). Agile software development methods: Review and analysis. arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.08439.

Gousios, G., Pinzger, M., & Deursen, A. V. (2014, May). An exploratory study of the pull-based software development model. In Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering (pp. 345-355). ACM.

Tayntor, C. (2006). Successful Packaged Software Implementation. Identifying requirements and potential products.. Auerbach Publications.

Thüm, T., Kästner, C., Benduhn, F., Meinicke, J., Saake, G., & Leich, T. (2014). FeatureIDE: An extensible framework for feature-oriented software development. Science of Computer Programming, 79, 70-85.

Verner, J. M., Brereton, O. P., Kitchenham, B. A., Turner, M., & Niazi, M. (2014). Risks and risk mitigation in global software development: A tertiary study. Information and Software Technology, 56(1), 54-78.