A Software Tool and Method for Scenario Generation and Use

Scenarios, in most situations, are descriptions of required interactions between a desired system and its environment which detail normative system behaviour. There is considerable current interest in the use of scenarios for acquisition, elaboration and validation of system requirements. However, despite this interest, there remains a lack of methods and software tools to generate and use scenarios during the requirements analysis phase. In this paper, we outline the architecture of a toolkit for semi-automatic generation of scenarios. We have derived complex taxonomies of exceptions to help a requirements engineer to predict non-normative system behaviour in a scenario. We have outlined a method of cause-consequence analysis to explore the occurrence of problem exceptions and their effects on system behaviour.