Alignment of Requirements Specification and Testing: A Systematic Mapping Study

Requirements should specify expectations on a software system and testing should ensure these expectations are met. Thus, to enable high product quality and efficient development it is crucial that requirements and testing activities and information are aligned. A lot of research has been done in the respective fields Requirements Engineering and Testing but there is a lack of summaries of the current state of the art on how to link the two. This study presents a systematic mapping of the alignment of specification and testing of functional or nonfunctional requirements in order to identify useful approaches and needs for future research. In particular we focus on results relevant for nonfunctional requirements but since only a few studies was found on alignment in total we also cover the ones on functional requirements. The map summarizes the 35 relevant papers found and discuss them within six major sub categories with model-based testing and traceability being the ones with most prior results.