Bridging the Gap Between Past and Future in RE: A Scenario-Based Approach

Requirements Engineering (RE) investigates the impact of a future-oriented change vision, but the move towards this vision must consider a context heavily shaped by the past. As RE be-comes a continuous process throughout the system lifecycle, it must achieve an effective combination of envisionment and trace-ability. In this paper, we describe a scenario-based solution to this problem which is based on an integration of five ingredients: (a) the persistent capture of context in the form of real world scenes captured in multimedia; (b) formal agent-oriented model-ling with a semantics that allows distributed interactive anima-tion; (c) message trace diagrams as a medium for exchanging animation test cases and traces; (d) a goal model to control and record the RE process; and (e) a process-integrated tool envi-ronment to ensure method-guidance and traceability with as little effort as possible. In addition to the basics of our approach, we also describe its prototypical implementation in the CREWS-EVE environment and demonstrate its usefulness with examples from a case study in the production industry.