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

CHAPTER 25

THE FUTURE OF SCENARIOS

Ian Alexander¹ and Neil Maiden²

¹Scenario Plus, London, UK

²Centre for HCI Design, City University, London, UK

INTRODUCTION: HORSES FOR COURSES

The previous chapter, What Scenarios (Still) Aren't Good For, toured some of the issues that beset scenarios, and suggested some elements of an agenda for research into scenario applications in system development.

Today we have an idea of how useful scenarios can be, but we certainly do not have a complete picture of how all the different possible scenario techniques might fit together with each other and with other specification techniques. The key questions that we have tried to address in this book are what scenario approaches there are, and what they are good for. A racing man might say ‘there's a horse for every course’; the trick, naturally, is knowing which one it is before you place your bet.

The question that arises for researchers is of course how one would know, and hence what guidance one could give to a project trying to select the best techniques for its circumstances. This brief chapter peers over the horizon at what a future version of this book might contain.

TOWARDS A FRAMEWORK

Researchers would like to have a comprehensive framework encompassing all scenario techniques, all domains, and all contexts of use—describing access to stakeholders, issues of how fixed or flexible scenarios should be to permit innovation, and so on. Clearly, this is a huge challenge, and it has many dimensions, ...