Business requirements are guidelines for software developers to know which way they should plan the software developing project. Generally the business gives the basic essential business requirements but it is duty of software developing company to find out all the requirements through analyzing and researching on the business & its processes as well as interviewing business owners. A well researched and analyzed requirements gathering phase is essential for software developing project. Because it is going to determine future IT costs of both software company and business. On the SDLC, even though the requirements analysis, design & development of software are the key stages, the software testing phase is the most important part to assure that the software meets business requirements. The below mentioned are few more aspects of software testing.
Requirements of Systems
Basically this refers to testing environments of developers and testers. But sometimes the individual systems also may have to be adjusted or upgraded to get high performance or compatibility. Setting up the test environment which is more identical and almost similar to the production environment (which is also known as “live environment” or “business environment”) is one of the must to consider aspect by the software development company in order to deliver the software that meets the business requirements. The research team should take the responsibility of acquiring accurate information regarding the live environments.
Utilizing the Limited Resources
More often than not, software companies only maintain one test environment instead of multiple systems. This helps save the IT costs and reduces several risks and complications. It is common in software companies that testing team and developing team run into conflicts when they are seeking access to the test environment. Procedures like test data reservation (i.e test data bookings) and test environment reservation (i.e test environment bookings) could zero the conflicts.
Protect Sensitive Data
It is essential for testing team to use actual data of business or business customers to test and ensure quality of the software. But sometimes the data that testers use can include confidential information such as names, addresses, credit card numbers, contact numbers, e-mails etc which is also known as personally identifiable information (PII – there are tools to check this, like DataHotSpot from Enov8). Apart from the business perspective, it often is illegal to use confidential data for software testing purposes without proper mechanism to safe guard privacy of test data. Usually, test data masking is applied in order to protect privacy of test data and is the best practice of software testing.