Automated Support to Capture Environment Assertions for Requirements-Based Testing

In order to mitigate the ever-increasing trend in software failures with far reaching consequences, research has suggested close coordination of requirements engineering (RE) and testing. The literature also advocates the notion of requirements-based testing (RBT) focusing on checking both the quality attributes and implementation of requirements. As requirements reside in the environment comprised of certain problem domain phenomena, the environment assertions connecting some of these phenomena in the indicative mood play a critical part in determining the correctness of a software solution. For formulating environment assertions, current literature provides manual techniques that are extremely time consuming and highly dependent on an individual's domain knowledge. In addition, developers often struggle to formulate good assertions from scratch. To address this issue, our work develops a boilerplate with certain placeholders that can be replaced with relevant attributes to formulate individual environment assertions. Leveraging this boilerplate, we further present a framework to capture environment assertions in an automated manner. An empirical study, involving 45 developers and 56 different software systems from 13 application domains, suggests that our framework captures useful environment assertions that are also relevant to software providing similar features in other application domains. Our work, to that end, opens new avenues for further coordination between RE and testing.