Broadcom Agile Requirements Designer Reviews

I work in the insurance and tax domains. The purpose of my using the tool is for user story creation and to have a traceability matrix for our development team and testing team.

The team I am working with was never into Agile before. We have a daily scrum-call and before that, we have to define all the tasks that we are going to work on for a number of sprints. For example, there is a Product Increment Planning meeting where we put all the user requirements into the product backlog. Then we put them back to the respective sprints.

A product increment consists of about five iterations, or five sprints. And we pull each of these backlog items to these particular sprints or iterations, so that it is easy for the development team to pick up, based on the priority. The backlog is set, and it is pulled into particular sprints, based on business priority.

So it helps the development team to take up and finish tasks within the required timeframe. It helps in productivity, traceability, and saves time.

• Model building: Creating business process flows
• Test case generation: Manual or automated
• Automation script creation and management

Test data management is coming at the end of March. That will be one of the biggest new leaps for us. We are very excited about adding TDM to the suite.

The new release CA Agile Requirements Designer 2.4 offers more flexibility when exploiting the APIs of test and defect management tools. CA has addressed this concern with release 2.4.

We deliver test cases ten times faster and automate in hours vs. days or weeks. We went from 90+ days behind in new automation to full, in-sprint automation with little to no technical debt.

Automation maintenance is now manageable. It reduced the number of people required for testing by 75%.

We deliver more stories faster.

Creating models for requirements definition and alignment, starting with high-level requirements definition and expanding models into detailed requirements to test models (manual testing). Also, creating models and analyzing and selecting appropriate test scope/coverage.

Using the test modeling approach helped 

• get early alignment on requirements
• prevent design and implementation defects in earlier development phases if models were used from the start to get everyone’s alignment
• improve test coverage (with manual and automated testing).

In terms of meeting business challenges, it helped to shorten the dev/testing cycle by identifying requirements gaps early in the process, by having models shared within the development team. It helped increase test coverage and reduce the number of issues experienced by clients/customers. It made test design & writing process more efficient. 

We use CA ARD to accelerate our testing. Currently, we write manual test scripts, and if you bring new people onboard, they have a learning curve because they do not know the products as well as experienced people. So, one of the primary things that we use the ARD for is to erase that SME knowledge versus newbie mentality. Once you put the requirements into the model diagram, the tool does all the test cases for you. It takes away all the time to construct test cases, so it is all automatic now, but it also levels the playing field. 

1. Now, we get automated test cases, where before we did not. It cuts out the construction time of testing, about 75%, is what we found. 
2. It is a store that we keep all of our requirements in where, before projects would come in and we would not have a place where we keep the past requirements so there was always a fight between development, testing, and the business writers because they can't remember how functionality works. Now, there is a black and white copy of how the processes are flowing through the system, so there is not a fight anymore about what is happening and what is not happening.

We are using Broadcom Agile Requirements Designer for DevOps. For example,  you might draw the diagram within Broadcom Agile Requirements Designer and it will turn these requirements into test cases automatically before you build the code. It all can be done with ease.

The most valuable features of Broadcom Agile Requirements Designer are ease of use, saving time for the team who builds test cases, and visibility of test cases.

We are trying to create models, then get the maximum number of test coverage by getting the minimum number of tests. That is what we are looking for: Getting the minimum amount of test cases which provide the maximum coverage. We want to test the minimum amount of cases. 

As of now, we do not have a tool which can tell us this. We might end up overtesting, but we have no way of knowing. For this purpose, we use other tools as well, to show how well it integrates and contributes to the continuous testing process.

We are trying to establish a process. As of now, we have not come to a point where we are only using ARD with other tools. We are trying to find better ways of how to use it. We have just done a type of PoC, where we have some model and created a number of test cases, which gives us an idea of the test cases to be executed afterward. We wanted to use it digitally, in practice, but what we see is data integration points. This does not give us the flexibility of ramming the test with multiple sets of data at one time. Therefore, we are just trying to look into the aspect where it gives us more flexibility in terms of integration and using it in our continuous process.

Optimization is something which I like in the tool. It gives me an idea of what are the minimum number of cases which I can execute in order to complete my testing.

We have a lot of quality assurance projects which are running. We normally validate the requirements and make sure the requirement scoping or the requirement validations are being done properly. We put the requirement breakdown and requirement scoping into Agile Requirements Designer (ARD). We plan our test cases so that the business user community can actually log into the ARD tool for their project and validate their requirements to see if they have passed the set of quality controls or not.

We are satisfied with the solution. 

I can't speak to a particular feature, however, in terms of the way the UI and the response of the tool are set up, including the hierarchy breakdown of the requirements and how they appear on the tool is great. I like how we could navigate from one breakdown to another. It makes the solution very user-friendly which is the main USP of the tool.

With the way we are using the Broadcom ARD tool, the solution provides us with everything we need. 

The support that we get from Broadcom is great. 

The product scales well.

We have found the solution to be stable. 

The most valuable features of this solution are the ease for creating test cases and the automation of the test cases from the user workflows.

It will enhance and make the automation part for the testers a lot easier.

It should allow the teams to create automated test cases a lot faster. They can do their testing within a two week sprint and then get the products released into production a lot sooner.