You Wish!

We got a slice of Ben Simo's backstory in his CAST 2022 workshop, Testing Without Requirements, last week.

It was a trip through working environments in which requirements had varying levels of detail, through Ben's evolution in thinking around the kinds of constraints that imposed on his work, and into a model of the testing landscape which recognises the dynamic nature of what is known and unknown during testing.

A couple of takeaways:

Stated requirements are not all of the requirements ... and we can test that.
Firm requirements are not always available ... but we can test to solidify them.
The requirements that matter meet a human need ... and we can test to learn what they are.

I guess I could summarise the presentation as:

Can we capture all and only the user wishes? You wish!

In the interactive section of the workshop we used the FEW HICCUPPS mnemonic to help us to identify unstated requirements for a product already in the field, and then discussed how we had arrived at them.

As a side note, I was interested to think of ethics as another potential consistency heuristic, one that doesn't seem to fit directly into any of the categories that FEW HICCUPPS provides. Unless perhaps we consider it a user desire?

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