Testing tools to manage requirements

The Qt Trial on OpenReq tools

The Qt Company is beginning a trial with the OpenReq.

Qt is a cross-platform application framework. It is used for developing applications that can be run on various platforms, whether desktop or embedded, with one technology and one codebase. Qt is, for instance, used in medical devices such as surgical robots or patient monitoring systems. Similarly, its is, for instance, used in the automotive industry to develop digital cockpits.

Qt´s open source community

The Qt software is licensed as open source software with dual licensing model (free/commercial). Open source usage of Qt is free The software users are, however, expected to contribute to the open source project by making their code available to other users. Qt is, therefore, developed by an open developer community. The community consists of companies and independent application developers. (Commercial users, on the other hand, have full rights to their codes and end products.)

Requirements management in the Qt Company

The open developer community has multiple channels to report problems or raise requirements to the Qt Company. The public RM tool, or Jira, is the biggest. It alone consists of more than 60 000 bugs reported by the community over years. Moreover, there are also challenges other than the scale. To be more specific, the large amount of duplicates or very similar issues in the requirements database burden management and decision-making.

The Qt OpenReq trial begins in 2018

The Qt Company is about to begin a trial this year (2018). It is going to test some of the tools already developed within the OpenReq to manage requirements. The participants in the OpenReq will then further develop the tools on the basis of this and other similar trials. The Qt Company is interested in seeing whether the trial offers help in, for instance, noticing and managing duplicate bug reports. In addition, the handling of requirements could possibly be automatised to some degree. Tools could perhaps be developed to automatically classify requirements and recommend relevant reviewers for them, for instance.

University of Helsinki is developing a prototype system for the trial

University of Helsinki, or more specifically the Empirical Software Engineering Helsinki (ESE) research group has been working on something that the Qt Company is going to use in the trial. They are developing a prototype system that automatically analyses the interdependencies of requirements taking into account also the properties of the requirements. The system addresses some concerns of product management and may prove to be helpful to such companies as the Qt dealing with large numbers of requirements.