Scenarios, Stories, Use Cases: Through the Systems Development Life-Cycle

CHAPTER 22

PUTTING SCENARIOS INTO PRACTICE

Ian Alexander¹ and Ramin Tavakoli Kolagari²

¹Scenario Plus, London, UK

²DaimlerChryslerResearch & Technology, Ulm, Germany

SCENARIOS ARE being applied in an increasingly rich and inventive way to a wide range of different types of problem in almost all areas of systems and software engineering. Scenarios in general are applicable throughout the life cycles of software and system developments, and indeed those of development programmes such as of whole product families. They are useful—in different forms—across the entire spectrum of domains and scales of project.

Perhaps it is becoming possible to see roughly which kinds of scenario are most likely to be helpful in different situations. We will try to draw some broad conclusions about how to put scenarios into practice—some may appear to be common sense; others may seem more surprising.

WHICH KIND OF SCENARIO, WHEN?

As the contributions from our chapter authors show in Parts 2 and 3 of this book, scenarios can be represented in many forms and can be applied to essentially any programme and project life-cycle activity (Figure 22.1). Engineers from different disciplines see scenarios differently, and they work in domains as varied as telecommunications, software, aerospace, human–computer interaction, transportation, and civil engineering.

But development engineers are neither the only group who may write scenarios, requirements, and specifications, nor the only group who may read them. ...