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Scenario inspections

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Abstract

Scenarios help practitioners to better understand the requirements of a software system as well as its interface with the environment. However, despite their widespread use both by object-oriented development teams and human–computer interface designers, scenarios are being built in a very ad-hoc way. Departing from the requirements engineering viewpoint, this article shows how inspections help software developers to better manage the production of scenarios. We used Fagan’s inspections as the main paradigm in the design of our proposed process. The process was applied to case studies and data were collected regarding the types of problems as well as the effort to find them.

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Notes

  1. As it has been well noted by Regnell in [17, p. 142]: “There is considerable risk for terminology confusion here, as the term scenario also is used within requirements engineering to denote a sequence of events involved in an envisaged usage situation of the system under development. A use case is often said to cover a set of related (system usage) scenarios. In scenario-based reading, however, the term scenario is a meta-level concept, denoting a procedure that a reader of a document should follow during inspection.” This note clearly shows the confusion; when we use the term scenario-based we are saying what Porter defined in [19]: “Scenarios – collections of procedures for detecting particular classes of faults.”

  2. Graduate and undergraduate students performed most of the writing of the scenarios, but case 1 and 7 were performed by software professionals.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro – PUC-Rio, Rua Marquês de São Vicente 255, 22451-041 Gávea-RJ, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Julio Cesar Sampaio do Prado Leite

  2. INTIA, Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, FRBA, Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, Pinto 399, 7000, Tandil, Argentina

    Jorge Horacio Doorn

  3. FRBA, Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, LINTI, Universidad Nacional de La Plata , Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Graciela D. S. Hadad

  4. FRBA, Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, LINTI, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Gladys N. Kaplan

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  1. Julio Cesar Sampaio do Prado Leite
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  2. Jorge Horacio Doorn
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  3. Graciela D. S. Hadad
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  4. Gladys N. Kaplan
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Correspondence to Julio Cesar Sampaio do Prado Leite.

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Leite, J.C.S.d.P., Doorn, J.H., Hadad, G.D.S. et al. Scenario inspections. Requirements Eng 10, 1–21 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-003-0186-9

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