Satisfy Traceability From Jama Requirements to Tests & Code

It’s astonishing how much planning, legal considerations, technical knowledge, and cost it takes to develop and deliver software systems. There are activities or sublayers of practice, like requirements management, testing or verification and validation of requirements, which are just a few of the phases in the software development life cycle (SDLC).

In addition, the development of safety- and security-critical systems further increases the labor and costs throughout each phase of the SDLC due to compliance and certification needs. Therefore incorporating an application lifecycle management (ALM) solution is vital to the success of a project.

ALM solutions, like Jama Connect, are designed to adapt to any popular SDLC methodology, including Waterfall, Spiral, Agile, or your own custom development technique. Whichever SDLC is in place, ALM solutions tackle the following general phases of software development:

• Requirements management
• Software design
• Software development
• Software testing

Encompassing these phases are three key workflow capabilities that ALM tools like Jama provide.

1. Cross-team collaboration and alignment.
2. Risk management throughout the development lifecycle.
3. Test management complemented and fulfilled by testing solutions.

Automated testing solutions, like those that Parasoft offers, give critical feedback about the completeness and thoroughness of the testing process to develop and deliver high-quality, compliant software.

• Verify and validate requirements.
• Provide traceability from requirements to tests and code.
• Ensure code functionality, safety, security, reliability, and ultimately, reach compliance to industry standards.

Managing Requirements

Requirements management is a process or technique for documenting all collected requirements, agreeing on the requirements, and then analyzing, decomposing and prioritizing them. Engineering teams can then design and develop according to current and approved requirements.

While requirements are being decomposed, traceability must be maintained throughout the phases of development as customer requirements decompose into system, high-level, and low-level requirements. The coding or implementation phase realizes the low-level requirements. Consider the typical V diagram of software.

Each phase drives the subsequent phase. In turn, the work items or refined requirements in each phase must satisfy the requirements from the previous phase. Architectural requirements that have been created or decomposed from system design must satisfy the system design/requirements, and so on.

Satisfying Jama Requirements at Each Phase

Traceability proves that each phase is satisfying the Jama requirements of each subsequent phase. Developers write code that implements or realizes each requirement and for safety-critical applications, links for traceability to test cases and down to the code are established. Therefore, if a customer requirement changes or is removed, the team knows what it impacts down the line, all the way to the code and tests that validate the requirements.

Industry standards like DO-178B/C, ISO 26262, IEC 62304, IEC 61508, EN 50128, and others require the construction of a traceability matrix for identification of any gaps in the design and verification of requirements. This helps achieve the ultimate goal of building the right product. More than that, it’s to ensure the product has the quality, safety, and security to ensure it remains the right product.

Verifying & Validating Requirements

Verification is the part of the SDLC that ensures work is correct. Software verification usually includes:

• Conformance to industry standards, ensuring process and artifacts meet the guidelines.
• Reviews, walkthroughs, inspections.
• Static analysis and other activities on artifacts produced during development.
• Enforcing architecture, design, and coding standards.
• Ensuring no gaps in the traceability matrix.

Validation is demonstrating that the end product meets its requirements. Those requirements encompass functionality plus reliability, performance, safety, and security. Further, validation indicates seeing, trying, and testing the product. It consists of the execution of the software and demonstration of it running, and typically involves:

• Code execution to demonstrate correct functionality
• Execution in target environments
• Stress, performance, penetration, and other nonfunctional testing
• Acceptance testing to customers

Accelerating Verification & Validation

Parasoft’s software test automation tools accelerate verification and validation of requirements by automating the many tedious aspects of record keeping, documentation, reporting, analysis, unit testing, integration testing, system testing, structural code coverage, and much more.

Here are strategies to effectively accelerate the verification and validation processes.

• Use static analysis as early as possible to ensure quality and security as developers write code. Further, static analysis prevents future bugs and vulnerabilities, reducing the downstream impact of bugs missed during inspection and testing.
• Automate coding standards compliance to reduce manual effort and accelerate code inspections.
• Provide two-way traceability for all artifacts to make sure requirements have code and tests to prove they are being fulfilled. Metrics, test results, and static analysis results are traced to requirements and vice versa.
• Perform code and test coverage to make sure all requirements are implemented and to make sure the implementation is tested as required.
• Offer analytics dashboard to help decision making and track progress. Decision-making needs to be based on data collected from the automated processes.
• Automate the generation of documentation to support process and standards compliance.
• Automate standards compliance to reduce the overhead and complexity by automating the most repetitive and tedious processes. And, tools can keep track of the project history and relating results against requirements, software components, tests, and recorded deviations.
• Automate all test suites to minimize manual testing and reduce the testing bottleneck from limited hardware availability.
• Execute target and host-based tests to support different validation techniques as required.
• Start shift-left testing as soon as teams develop code. It leverages unit testing frameworks and automatically generates harnesses to test as soon as code is ready. Support for test-driven development and continuous testing is available as an organization’s process matures.
• Manage change with smart test execution to focus on tests only for code that changed and any impacted dependents.

Automating the SDLC

The integration between Jama Connect and Parasoft is more than complementary. The combination automates and helps fulfill the tasks required for each of the SDLC phases. At the core of every software project, you’ll find the requirements that define the functional and nonfunctional behavior of the system.

To ensure that the system meets its expectations, Jama requirements are decomposed. Traceability links are established between the artifacts that refine or satisfy them. Parasoft’s automated software testing solutions then help verify and validate Jama requirements, satisfying compliance and software certification obligations from industries, like automotive, avionics, medical, industrial, and rail.