Abstract

Scenarios have been used in different areas such as military, economy, software engineering, human computer interaction, and theatrical arts. In software and user interface requirements, a scenario is a description of a person's interaction with a system. It describes what the user wants to do but does not describe how this is to be done. Scenario-based requirements engineering brings an integrated answer to the following questions: Who, What, Where, When, and Why. This thesis illustrates different meanings and describes different examples that illustrate the power of scenarios in different areas. In addition, a survey of the current existing tools for scenario-based requirement engineering is presented. In the second part, we propose a progressive, iterative and interleaved process of using scenario at different requirement engineering stages including elicitation, analysis and validation. This process model has been applied to our SUCRE (Scenario and Use Cases for User-Centered Requirement Engineering), which is an XML-based system for scenario-driven requirement engineering. SUCRE is a tool for working with scenarios. Within the SUCRE system, scenarios are stories that capture information about users and their tasks, including the context of use. In our SUCRE system, scenarios are stored in an XML-based database and described using XML notation. Besides the SUCRE system prototype, we discuss the XML-based structure of the scenario database we are developing. The paper concludes with a discussion on the evolution of the process model and the XML-based SUCRE system.