Toward better software test estimates and requirement tracking

Estimating the effort and cost, and developing the project schedule are very important for building a successful software project. But estimation is hard. There is always pressure from project sponsor and management for software development team to commit to shorter schedule and lower cost. It is no exception for testing. Test is a key activity for software quality. Some of the main challenges in testing today are to match the test cases with requirements correctly, and to provide accurate estimates and track the test progress accordingly. In this paper, we present a parametric model for software test estimate along with a test graph for matching test cases with requirements and test cases analysis to aid in producing a more accurate estimates and tracking. The model and the test graph can be used jointly or individually. The model and the test graph have been used by multi-million-dollar software projects for more than three years. It is shown that they produced very accurate estimations, within 10% of deviation, even with very high requirement volatility.