Bridging the gap between past and future in RE: a scenario-based approach

Requirements engineering (RE) investigates the impact of a future-oriented change vision, but the move towards this vision must consider a context heavily shaped by the past. As RE becomes a continuous process throughout the system lifecycle, it must achieve an effective combination of envisionment and traceability. We describe a scenario-based solution to this problem which is based on an integration of five ingredients: the persistent capture of context in the form of real world scenes captured in multimedia; formal agent-oriented modelling with a semantics that allows distributed interactive animation; message trace diagrams as a medium for exchanging animation test cases and traces; a goal model to control and record the RE process; and a process-integrated tool environment to ensure method-guidance and traceability with as little effort as possible. In addition to the basics of our approach, we also describe its prototypical implementation in the CREWS-EVE environment and demonstrate its usefulness with examples from a case study in the production industry