Using Defect Taxonomies for Testing Requirements

Systematic defect management based on bug-tracking systems such as Bugzilla is well established and has been successfully used in many software organizations. Defect management weights the failures observed during test execution according to their severity and forms the basis for effective defect taxonomies. In practice, most defect taxonomies are used only for the a posteriori allocation of testing resources to prioritize failures for debugging. Thus, these taxonomies´ full potential to control and improve all the steps of testing has remained unexploited. This is especially the case for testing a system´s user requirements. System-level defect taxonomies can improve the design of requirements-based tests, the tracing of defects to requirements, the quality assessment of requirements, and the control of the relevant defect management. So, we developed requirements-based testing with defect taxonomies (RTDT). This approach is aligned with the standard test process and uses defect taxonomies to support all phases of testing requirements. To illustrate this approach and its benefits, we use an example project (which we call Project A) from a public health insurance institution.