Today we're talking to Fergal McGovern, CTO at Steeltrace. They're an Irish company that makes tools that help developers capture, document and model business, system and test requirements. Wolfgang and Fergal talk about the relationship between requirements and testing.

• QA Podcast #8: The Journey From Business Needs to Test and User Acceptance with Fergal McGovern (MP3, 16.5 MB, 23:32)

Due to some URL-related fussiness, the iTunes directory hadn't been updating the last couple of podcasts. We diagnosed and resolved this issue with help from a listener--thanks a bunch, Chris! iTunes users may have noticed that episodes #6 and #7 arrived immediately after the issue was resolved, but now you should be all up to date.

Here are some quotes from today's show:

I'm quite intrigued about the way you position the starting point as being goals. A lot of people talk about requirements being the starting point. But you talk about goals or needs that first get translated into requirements and then finally have an impact on how the system is tested.

Unfortunately, simple communication is rarely simple in the real world. I'll give you a case in point. What we found recently with Agile [software development] on one engagement that I Was involved in, a major US-based corporation. They were deploying Agile--specifically extreme programming (XP). I asked a senior project manager what the biggest challenge was with XP. Her answer was "no documentation".

We frequently see business analysts play crucial roles in QA. On the other hand, that can often be a bad thing, because the analyst is too close to the actual domain. Just like a coder doing testing, they're almost contaminated by what's in their head as the primary flows and what they should focus on...whoever's playing the role needs to be quite diligent.

Links for this conversation's topic:

• Managing Software Projects with Business-Based Requirements (PDF)

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