Setting-up an alternative regression management process

I’ve been working for many customers for many years and one of the usual comments regarding the project development process is that most of big organizations often face a problem to define clearly the project objectives in particular functional and non-functional requirements.

These companies develop big Information Systems that are enhanced and maintained developing a high number of projects in parallel. At the beginning of the system development, the complexity was not so high and there were not so much applications to help for the project development processes. Thus, requirement specification was not a key step in the development processes.

This being so, at present, few of these companies have made up for creating and sharing a common requirement repository that describes the functionalities of the system. In many cases, project developments have not been carried-out with the perspective to draw-up a global functional mapping of the system.

Today, the lack of system documentation that has continuously increased over the time implies that the whole system is often split into different parts that are managed independently. There are neither rules nor specified level of details to guide the definition of project requirements. By consequences; it is more difficult to get a global point of view.

Without a global functional mapping of the system, the development of projects generates an inconsistent way to define and organize the test cases. Testware sharing and reuse is not possible (or at least quite complicated) due to the high number of inconsistent and sometimes incompatible requirements created in parallel in the context of the projects.

Facing this situation one more time, I proposed to the customer to implement an alternative for managing requirements. The main objective was to provide a way to map regression test cases defined during the acceptance test specification phase of each project to a transversal structure that could be consolidated and shared by future projects. The regression test set is also the base of the release regression phase.

More information: 

Thibault Schnellbach

Test Lead Senior