In order to mitigate the ever-increasing trend in software failures with far reaching consequences, research has suggested close coordination of requirements engineering (RE) and testing. The literature also advocates the notion of requirements-based testing (RBT) focusing on checking both the quality attributes and implementation of requirements. As requirements reside in the environment comprised of certain problem domain phenomena, the environment assertions connecting some of these phenomena in the indicative mood play a critical part in determining the correctness of a software solution. Although several investigations emphasize the role of environment assertions in testing and QA activities, including RBT, current literature provides manual techniques of formulating environment assertions. Such an approach is extremely time consuming and highly dependent on an individual's domain knowledge. In addition, developers often struggle to formulate good assertions from scratch. To address this issue, in this thesis, we develop a boilerplate with certain placeholders that can be replaced with relevant attributes to formulate individual environment assertions. Leveraging this boilerplate, we further present a framework to capture environment assertions in an automated manner.

Software developers dedicate a major portion of their development effort towards testing and quality assurance (QA) activities, especially during and around the implementation phase. Nevertheless, we continue to see an alarmingly increasing trend in the cost and consequences of software failure. In an attempt to mitigate such loss and address software issues at a much earlier stage, researchers have recently emphasized on the successful coordination of requirements engineering and testing (RET). Jackson points out that requirements reside in the environment which is comprised of certain phenomena, also known as environment assertions, and a large number of software issues stem from faulty environment assertions. Current literature doesn’t provide any explicit emphasis on the environment assertions during QA activities. In order to address this gap, in this thesis, we present a detailed empirical study on the prominence of environment assertions in RBT and further propose an automated support to capture environment assertions.