A scenario‐based approach for requirements engineering: Experience in a telecommunication software development project

Abstract Scenarios have been studied theoretically, and they have been successfully applied, e.g., in requirements engineering. Still, requirements engineers using scenarios in practice are facing real‐world challenges. Especially, the fit of scenarios in the larger context of requirements engineering is an issue. So, for effective and efficient application of scenario‐based approaches in real‐world practice more experience will have to be gained and reported. We report on experience of scenario‐based requirements engineering for a real‐world telecommunication software development project. Scenarios were represented in this project by use of SDL (Specification and Description Language) diagrams rather than narratives in natural language. Still, the SDL diagrams were integrated with a hypertextual representation in natural language of functional requirements for the system to be built. They were also linked to a large domain model of telecommunication concepts built in the course of this project. All this modeling was guided by employing the metamodel of this scenario‐based approach for requirements engineering. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 8: 197–210, 2005