Software requirements testing approaches: a systematic literature review

Testing a software system is an important step approach to ensuring quality, safety, and reliability in safety-critical systems (SCS). Several authors have published new approaches to improve the processes of testing safety requirements taking into consideration existing processes that seek to improve techniques and contribute positively with software developers. This article aims to investigate the main approaches to requirements testing, particularly focusing on safety requirements in the context of SCS. We investigated how these approaches have been developed and what contributions they provide to academia and industry. We evaluated the pros and cons of the approaches and how they related to the joint work of requirements engineers and testers. We performed a systematic literature review (SLR), selecting 53 papers published between 1990 and 2018. Our research was conducted according to the guidelines proposed by Kitchenham and Biolchini. The results of this SLR point out to the new research related to the software and safety-critical systems testing. The results show issues in the integration of requirements engineers with the application test team and gaps in the approaches found, particularly in the applications of the techniques in the industry setting. Moreover, several approaches are presented to solve problems and help to prevent future problems. The results of this research point to the main approaches to requirements testing and their use in academia and industry, as well as the advantages and disadvantages. The shortcomings allow us to suggest new research in safety-critical systems in the scope of validation, verification, specification, and testing of safety requirements, as well as to integrate test teams with requirements engineers in order to get better results. Based on the results, we suggest future studies for improvements in the requirements testing techniques to improve the integration of safety requirements and test cases.