Scenario T6 - Qualification status is assessed

Motivation

This scenario addresses the assessment of qualification status for a set of requirements at any point in the development lifecycle.

As a general rule, the qualification status of a given requirement is an aggregation of the status of any qualification activities that are linked directly to that requirement, together with the qualification status of any supporting, lower-level requirements.

Note that, to some extent, this scenario is already covered in Requirement Scenario A and also in the Quality Management scenarios.

Note also that Quality Management Scenario B could be interpreted as presuming that there is a given requirement only needs a single test case. In reality, the relationship between requirements and test cases is many-to-many (i.e. one requirement will typically require more than one test case to qualify it, and one test case will typically support qualification of more than one requirement).

Pre-conditions

Requirements exist at various levels and are traced. Qualification cases exist, and are traced to the requirements that they support. Individual qualification cases incorporate a status property. The qualification status of a given set of requirements is being assessed.

Scenario

1. The collection of 'source' requirements is assembled.
2. A traceability graph is created that contains all of the source requirements and all of their supporting 'child' requirements (linked via a named relationship).
   1. This graph will typically extend over multiple layers of traceability
3. The traceability graph is extended by appending the set of qualification cases that support all of the requirements in the traceability graph (linked via a named relationship).
   1. There may be structure within the qualification case domain, so the graph of qualification cases supporting a given requirement may also extend over multiple layers of traceability

Post-conditions

A traceability graph exists that contains all source requirements, all supporting requirements, all qualification cases that support these requirements, and all other their interrelationships. This graph can then be further processed by the client to infer the aggregate qualification status of the entire source requirement set, or any requirement within the graph.

Notes

An open issue is whether or not it is appropriate to perform status aggregation within the scope of the OSLC API. The assumption made here is that it is not appropriate, since there may be many different aggregation schemes, and aggregation is arguably a problem for the client. If a suitably generic aggregation scheme could be defined, then this assumption could be changed.

-- SimonWills - 05 Feb 2010