An Experiment on the Suitability of RAM for Test Case Design

To perform software testing at the early stages of software development process can save the cost and effort on finding and fixing defects. As the first stage of software development process, requirements engineering has been moved away from projectinitiated requirements engineering towards requirements-initiated development in the last decade. This leads new challenges that it demands support for handling the requirements continually come in from multiple stakeholders on multiple abstraction levels instead of some specific customers. Requirements Abstraction Model was developed as a hierarchical abstraction method for requirements management, which is enable product management to leverage their resources and select requirements for implementation without overloading the organization. RAM was validated in industry on the usability for requirements management, but there is no evaluation for RAM on software testing. This thesis presents an empirical study with a goal of evaluating the suitability of RAM for test case design in respective of efficiency and effectiveness by the comparison with IEEE Std. 830 which is a standard of the traditional requirements specification. For achieving the goal of this study, a controlled experiment is conducted based on the refinement on an initial experiment planning, and is operated with twenty developers in industry in China. Analysis of the collected data from the experiment indicates that RAM has a similar effectiveness as using the requirements in IEEE Std. 830 format, while RAM is more efficient for test case design. Therefore, RAM is suitable for test case design, and has better performance than IEEE Std. 830 comprehensively in view of both efficiency and effectiveness.