Animated Requirements Walkthroughs Based on Business Scenarios

Detecting requirements errors late in a project is extremely costly, because the necessary changes mostly affect every development stage. Thus it is advisable to concentrate efforts on gathering and validating requirements. This particularly encompasses rigorous requirements testing before document delivery. In this paper we focus on the most critical portion of the transition from an user-oriented requirements description to an object-oriented model, namely the mapping of use cases onto classes and operations of an object-oriented model including its validation. We present a way to link use cases with the underlying class model, propose business scenarios as an appropriate means to test the behaviour of the integrated model, and sketch a corresponding CASE-tool which supports animated walkthroughs of use cases down to the operations, keeps track of detected errors and anomalies, and computes suitable coverage metrics.