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

CHAPTER 2

SCENARIO-BASED APPROACHES

Neil Maiden¹ and Ian Alexander²

¹Centre for HCI Design, City University, London, UK

²Scenario Plus, London, UK

THE CREWS project created a framework to classify scenario approaches by their form, contents, purpose, and life cycle. It was developed to inform further research and development work in scenario-based systems development, and as such provides a useful framework for classifying and reviewing the many pieces of work reported in the chapters in this book. This chapter explains what that framework is, and applies it to highlight distinctive features and trends in the various scenario approaches described in Part II of the current volume.

OVERVIEW: THE CREWS SCENARIO FRAMEWORK

The CREWS scenario framework is described in (Rolland et al. 1998). Readers are referred to that report for a full description of the framework, with detailed examples. The framework considers different scenario approaches from research or industrial practice along four different axes or views, each capturing an aspect of the scenarios:

• The form view deals with the expression mode of a scenario. Are scenarios formally or informally described, in a static, animated or interactive form?—are the kinds of questions that this view deals with. Scenario form can include text, tables, and so on.
• The contents view concerns the kind of knowledge that is expressed in a scenario. Scenarios can, for instance, focus on the description of system functionality or they can describe ...