Fitting scenarios to the requirements process

Scenarios are used more and more in requirements engineering (RE) but they tend to be used in an ad hoc way. The paper describes a typical RE process and then tries to fit some scenario approaches to that process. The goal is to identify where there is a lack and also an abundance of scenario approaches to specific phases in the RE process so that the developer can choose which scenario approach to use. From this positioning it is shown that the requirements discovery phase is less served by scenario approaches than other phases. There are also many approaches that are suited to only certain parts of the RE process, meaning that if one such approach is used it would be difficult to follow a coherent scenario based path through the RE process. Only a few approaches claim to be usable in many (if not all) of the RE process but there are problems with some of these approaches. The nature of scenario based design forces reconsideration of what forms part of the RE process and what does not. The RE process needs re-positioning to address crossover between phases and thus make the best use of scenarios