Supporting Scenario-based Requirements Engineering

Scenarios have been advocated as a means of improving requirements engineering yet few methods or tools exist to support scenario based RE. The paper reports a method and software assistant tool for scenario-based RE that integrates with use case approaches to object oriented development. The method and operation of the tool are illustrated with a financial system case study. Scenarios are used to represent paths of possible behaviour through a use case and these are investigated to elaborate requirements. The method commences by acquisition and modelling of a use case. The use case is then compared with a library of abstract models that represent different application classes. Each model is associated with a set of generic requirements for its class, hence, by identifying the class(es) to which the use case belongs, generic requirements can be reused. Scenario paths are automatically generated from use cases, then exception types are applied to normal event sequences to suggest possib..