Managing Use Cases During Goal-Driven Requirements Engineering: Challenges Encountered and Lessons Learned

Use cases and scenarios have emerged as prominent analysis tools during requirements engineering activities due to both their richness and informality. In some instances, for example when a project''s budget or schedule time is reduced on short notice, practitioners have been known to adopt a collection of use cases as a suitable substitute for a requirements specification. Given the challenges inherent in managing large collections of scenarios, this shortcut is cause for concern and deserves focused attention. We discuss our experiences with a goal-driven analysis of a requirements specification for an electronic commerce application for a large international company. We describe scenario management within the context of this goal-driven requirements analysis effort. In particular, we identify the specific risks incurred, focusing more on the challenges imposed due to traceability, inconsistent use of terminology, incompleteness and consistency, rather than on traditional software project management risks. We conclude by discussing the impact of the lessons learned for requirements engineering in the context of building quality systems during goal and scenario analysis.