Scenarios Read by People and Software

Thomas Alspaugh, Assistant Professor
Department of Informatics
University of California Irvine

Abstract

Scenarios are widespread in software requirements practice, where they written almost exclusively for human readers. As a result, tool support for scenarios remains weak, and software development does not receive the full benefit of the work put into them. Despite the informal prose form of scenarios, people interpret and use them in consistent patterns that follow relationships embodied in the text. ScenarioML is a markup language with which scenario authors can make these relationships explicit, so that software tools can give effective support for working with scenarios, and programs can read scenarios in order to use them for more purposes. ScenarioML's semantics are defined in terms of how scenarios describe the world, resulting in equivalences and specializations between structurally-related events that can be exploited for scenario refactoring, event recognition, and other software processing. These semantics combined with tools for presenting scenarios effectively show promise for a representation of requirements that is clearer and more effective both for nontechnical stakeholders and for developers. We discuss three recent and current applications of ScenarioML for scenario tool support, automated multimedia presentations of scenarios, and requirements-based testing.