Risk Based Testing with Requirement Priorities

Conformiq Creator allows to model risk by specifying requirement priorities. These priorities are then considered during test generation and allow to model aspects of the application that are considered to be more critical or “riskier” than others, i.e., Conformiq Creator tests these riskier paths more extensively than other paths through the model.

The optional Priority property of a requirement action should be used to specify the priority. The priority mass (or overall test priority) is calculated for each path through the model by summing up the requirement priorities encountered in that path: the initial mass is always 1 and after that every requirement action not yet been encountered with a priority increments the total by that priority value. Thus, the priority mass of a path which includes two requirement actions with priority property set to 5 and 2 is 1 + 5 + 2 = 8. The bigger the number, the more important the given model part is and the higher the risk associated with the requirement is.

Requirements which have been downloaded via a Requirement Provider from a 3rd party requirement management tool may also have a separate, external priority (set by the requirement management system). This external priority is used by Conformiq Creator as a default value for the priority in the requirement action, but the value can be overridden in the Priority property in the Properties View, e.g., to manage the relative priority between requirements of same priority for testing purposes.