Scenarios and scenario-based methods for requirements engineering

Scenarios have been widely applied to the problems of process analysis, software design and requirements engineering. The success of scenarios lies in their coupling of expressiveness with a natural narrative structure that makes them an ideal format for communicating ideas between analysts and laypeople. In requirements engineering, scenarios have been applied to the problems of requirements elicitation, elaboration, modeling, validation, and verification with great success. This paper introduces scenarios and scenario-based methods for requirements engineering. Two methods in particular, ScenIC and SCRAM, are described in detail along with a discussion of their relative merits. These methods, despite their differences in emphasis and process, both rely on scenarios as an effective tool for reasoning about system requirements and communicating with stakeholders. Scenarios and scenario-based methods are motivated using examples of scenarios for a distance learning application.