Tacit requirements

Tacit requirements image
Tacit requirements are usually undocumented and often just expected. Deciphering such requirements comes with experience and practice. As a tester, it's important to test against tacit requirements and expectations as these often get ignored during the development lifecycle, time pressure, iterative updates, etc. 

Examples of tacit requirements: 
  • Consistency: Uniform behaviour within and across features as well as other similar applications. 
  • History: Backward compatibility with previous versions. Changes to a feature will have no impact on other features. 
  • Familiar user expectations: Aligning user experience with industry norms or comparable products. Example: It is assumed that a double click will open a file. 
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