Requirement priority

All requirements are not equal, and the product owner should assign a priority to each one. That will let the development team know their relative importance so that they can make informed choices when they have to make inevitable tradeoffs.

I won’t describe that process here; instead, I focus on what you need for testing. Once the priorities have been decided and the technical limitations and opportunities have been explored, you need a final description of what will be shipped in this release. As a tester, your job is to make the specification binary – whether a requirement is included or not. Product owners and developers work in the gray areas of deadlines and feature estimates, so it’s your job to make the outcome black and white.

Feature prioritization and estimation are skills in their own right, but they are beyond the scope of this book. Here, I will concentrate on describing the features that made the cut by being clear on...