If you’re an avid follower of our blog here at Lighthouse Technologies, you’ll notice the trend that many of the frustrations around software coding quality usually start at the very core – the business requirements. If you get those wrong, too vague, misleading, or misunderstood, your final result is more than likely doomed to fail expectations.
Today is the day for project managers, business analysts, and sponsors to rejoice, for we found a tool that addresses this very challenge. Better than that, the ScopeMaster SaaS tool analyzes your business requirements faster than the most experienced human. This tool saves the project time and cost, all while building a higher level of quality from the very beginning.
Enter artificial intelligence
Back in June 2019, we talked about the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) in the software development and testing realm. Some inspiring things were emerging, and today we have a perfect example to share with you. ScopeMaster is an ideal example of one of the many ways that AI can be used to maximize resources and simultaneously increase quality.
ScopeMaster is blazing the trail for software development tools by using artificial intelligence technology to understand the meaning of the requirements text or Agile user stories. In doing so, this tool helps teams improve the quality of their requirements early, putting their best foot forward from the beginning.
Until now, documenting requirements was a manual process, and analysis meant audits and reviews from other team members, followed by one or five rewrites and corrections. The automation of requirements analysis not only saves hours of labor but achieves a higher level of quality and greater confidence before anyone writes the first line of code.
Starting with user stories
To prepare ScopeMaster to engage, user stories are entered into the tool by using the story builder feature or from uploading a CSV file. If your team uses Jira, ScopeMaster has a plug-in that can synchronize with Jira, avoiding duplication of effort.
Before the big reveal – think about the time you and your team spend currently getting requirements feedback, along with the rework time spent making corrections. Now write that number down. Did you write it down?
ScopeMaster will analyze your user story by:
- Reading the requirements and detecting functional intent.
- Identifying potential problems and recommend improvements.
- Comparing and correlating with other requirements
- Estimating functional size
- Generating functional test scripts
How many hours of effort are you currently allocating for all of these tasks for your business analysts and product owners? ScopeMaster accomplishes all of this in about 4 seconds. Yes, you read that correctly – 4 SECONDS! I thought that might get your attention. Take a moment and imagine the savings in time and effort.
With the use of AI, ScopeMaster interprets your user story to identify potential problems, eliminate ambiguities and redundancy. Thanks to the wisdom of the world’s requirements engineering experts’ contributions with building ScopeMaster, using this tool is like having experts review your requirements every time.
Functional sizing estimates
Rapid, high-quality development is critical to organizations with our greater dependency on software in any type of organization. To our mutual advantage – the future of software development is looking good.
ScopeMaster is the first tool in the world to produce automated software quality and sizing analysis. User stories are sized automatically in ISO standard functional size metrics of COSMIC AND IFPUG.
ScopeMaster estimates functional size based on the user stories, which reduces software costs with more accurate, data-based estimates. Test managers and QA leads will love that the ScopeMaster tool generates many of the crucial positive and negative functional tests in a matter of seconds.
This feature saves your software team an incredible amount of time and money, which leads to faster development with higher quality, all at cost savings without compromise.
User stories to functional tests
It doesn’t matter what kind of software is being developed. Functional testing remains a critical aspect of software quality assurance. Based on the requirements or user story, functional testing includes a series of checks and tests of the new software.
Functional tests check that the code does what the user story says it should (positive test), and it avoids doing anything it shouldn’t (negative tests). This testing accounts for 20% to 40% of the total time and effort of the entire project. Designing those tests accounts for around 1% to 3% fo the total cost of development. Using ScopeMaster introduces the opportunity for a significant reduction in those costs.
ScopeMaster summary
The three benefits that software teams realize with using ScopeMaster are:
- Increased quality with requirements. Defects are identified and fixed before coding begins.
- Increased predictability with reliable size estimates using ISO standard metrics.
- Functional test cases are auto-generated based on the content of the user stories.
Imagine the decreased project effort with this level of automation. Many organizations report an immediate 25% reduction in effort and a simultaneous reduction of risks related to project failures and overruns. Users of ScopeMaster report overall gains in productivity up to 20x on requirements analysis and 4x on functional sizing. Overall, project cost savings have been as high as 30% on larger software projects.
Lighthouse is a leading U.S. partner for ScopeMaster, so contact us today to schedule a risk-free demo. Add “ScopeMaster demo” in the comments so we get our expert on the topic started with you from the beginning.
Focus on the bigger picture
To keep up and stay competitive, organizations rely on rapid software innovation. Those who are successfully implementing high-quality software innovations are most likely to rise above the competition in performance and profits. Scopemaster is an excellent start to achieving higher quality software.
Lighthouse Technologies is the next step toward superior quality with our experience and expertise in software testing. Our processes are supreme, yet we are nimble enough to fit into various team structures and practices. Bring us to your tools, or we can bring our tools to you. Lighthouse’s efficiencies take your quality assurance from requirements to finish for the best software results, on time and right on budget. If you’ve not tried Lighthouse Technologies before, now is the time to start. Contact us, and let’s take your organization to the next level.
After spending over 20 years managing, developing, and deploying complex software/hardware systems for both commercial and Department of Defense (DoD) applications, Jeff founded Lighthouse in 2000 with the aim of establishing a company whose customer service was only eclipsed by the quality of its work. Armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of motivational leadership tactics and a wealth of expertise in software quality assurance (QA) processes and technical leadership, he’s both a hands-on company leader and the primary architect of Lighthouse’s celebrated workplace culture.
Great article. I’ve used ScopeMaster and it is amazing. This is a very good summary. One thing that wasn’t mentioned was the difficulty of managing User Stories as the number of them grows from sprint to sprint. ScopeMaster does an excellent job of looking at a large set of User Stories, especially of finding duplicates, missing requirements, and inconsistencies. This is essential for long, large projects.
Thanks to the folks at Lighthouse for this great write up. We are very excited to be collaborating with an organisation such as Lighthouse that looks upon end-to-end quality achievement as their primary focus. Great software starts with great requirements.