Making Use of Scenarios: A Field Study of Conceptual Design

Abstract. Scenarios have gained acceptance in both research and practice as a way of grounding softwareengineering projects in the users ’ work. However, the research on scenario-based design (SBD) includes very few studies of how scenarios are actually used by practising software engineers in real-world projects. Such studies are needed to evaluate current SBD approaches and advance our general understanding of what scenarios contribute to design. This longitudinal field study analyses the use of scenarios during the conceptual design of a large information system. The role of the scenarios is compared and contrasted with that of three other design artefacts: the requirements specification, the business model, and the user interface prototype. The distinguishing features of the scenarios were that they were task-based and descriptive. By being task-based the scenarios strung individual events and activities together in purposeful sequences and, thereby, provided an intermediate level of description that was both an instantiation of overall work objectives and a fairly persistent context for the gradual elaboration of subtasks. By being descriptive the scenarios preserved a real-world feel of the contents, flow, and dynamics of the users ’ work. The scenarios made the users ’ work recognisable to the software engineers as a complex but organised human activity. This way the scenarios attained a unifying role as mediator among both the design artefacts and the software engineers, whilst they were not used for communication with users. The scenarios were, however, discontinued before the completion of the conceptual design because their creation and management was dependent on a few software engineers who were also the driving forces of several other project activities. Finally, the software engineers valued the concreteness and coherence of the scenarios although it entailed a risk of missing some effective re-conceptions of the users’ work