Aligning requirements and testing through metamodeling and patterns: design and evaluation

Poorly executed requirements engineering activities profoundly affect the deliverables’ quality and project’s budget and schedule. High-quality requirements reuse through requirement patterns has been widely discussed to mitigate these adverse outcomes. Requirement patterns aggregate similar applications’ behaviors and services into well-defined templates that can be reused in later specifications. The abstraction capabilities of metamodeling have shown promising results concerning the improvement of the requirement specifications’ quality and professionals’ productivity. However, there is a lack of research on requirement patterns beyond requirements engineering, even using metamodels as the underlying structure. Besides, most companies often struggle with the cost, rework, and delay effects resulting from a weak alignment between requirements and testing. In this paper, we present a novel metamodeling approach, called Software Pattern MetaModel (SoPaMM), which aligns requirements and testing through requirement patterns and test patterns. Influenced by well-established agile practices, SoPaMM describes functional requirement patterns and acceptance test patterns as user stories integrated with executable behaviors. Another novelty is the evaluation of SoPaMM’s quality properties against a metamodel quality evaluation framework. We detail the evaluation planning, discuss evaluation results, and present our study’s threats to validity. Our experience with the design and evaluation of SoPaMM is summarized as lessons learned.