Designing with scenarios: A critical review of current research and practice

There is a great deal of requirements engineering specifically, and information systems development research in general, in the area of scenarios as the ‘vocabulary’ for discussing and characterising designs for new artefacts. This is partly due to opening up the design process to a variety of participants in a project, and making explicit their ways of working, thinking and interactions with the design products. Scenarios, being concrete, and easy to understand and use, provide the means to describe the design vocabulary. They are used to focus on episodic cases, exchange ideas and thoughts about them effectively, and generally describe requirements and designs for a new artefact from the user’s perspective. In this paper, we review the effectiveness of the current state-of-practice in scenario-based approaches. The objective of this evaluation exercise is to define the requirements for improved ‘by scenario’ approaches to cope with requirements and designs for developing new artefacts.