Aligning Requirements and Acceptance Tests via Automatically Generated Guidance

Keeping requirements and acceptance test documents aligned and up-to-date plays an important role in the success of software projects. In practice, these documents are not always aligned with each other, nor with the actual system behavior. A previous study showed that even when requirements are updated, acceptance tests might stay outdated, which often leads to quality problems and unintended costs. In order to keep the requirements and test documents in a consistent state, we are developing an approach that automatically generates guidance on how to change impacted acceptance tests when changes in requirements occur. In this paper, we briefly present our approach and a prototype tool that implements it. A preliminary evaluation of our approach yielded encouraging results.