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Past RESG Event
Getting The Best From Scenarios In Your Project
Tutorial and Seminar.
Contact Monica Ferraro (monicaf@soi.city.ac.uk) for further information.
Download registration form and agenda (doc).
Date
10 June 2008 (9am-5pm)
Venue
Northampton Suite A & B, City University, London (maps and travel information).
The venue will be signed from the main entrance in Northampton Square.
Scenarios in their many forms---user stories, concepts of operations, storyboards, use cases, and more---offer an exceptionally powerful way to understand complex systems. This special full-day RESG event brings you up to speed with the theory and practice of scenarios for your project with a tutorial from the lead author of the acclaimed Scenarios, Stories, Use Cases textbook, followed by a seminar with leading experts from academia and industry.
Morning Tutorial
Introduction To Scenarios
Ian Alexander, Scenario Plus
This tutorial begins by looking at the nature of scenarios in all their many forms, from stories and storyboards to fully-dressed use cases. The pros and cons of the different styles are explained.
It then examines ways of discovering scenarios, with practical workshop techniques and common scenario patterns. Use cases, being extremely popular but poorly understood, are explained in some detail.
Exceptions are key components of use cases; the tutorial explores how to use scenario structure to improve the search for exceptions, and how to identify the ones that really matter.
The tutorial then looks at negative scenarios, including intentional threats and forbidden combinations, and considers how to discover them.
Finally, the valuable relationship of scenarios and test cases is examined. Ways that you can use scenarios to start working on tests early in a project are discussed.
The tutorial is accompanied by group exercises in scenario discovery. Each exercise is fully debriefed so that participants can learn from each others’ experiences.
Afternoon Seminar
Techniques
"Scenarios in the Wild: Experiences with Mobile Tools for Scenario-Based Requirements Discovery"
Paul Grünbacher, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
Scenarios are an effective technique for discovering stakeholder requirements. They can be used in many different and interesting ways: For instance, people run scenario workshops for same-time same-place discovery of requirements. An alternative is to perform scenario walkthroughs in the work context of future system users supported by mobile technologies. In this talk we present the Mobile Scenario Presenter (MSP), a software tool that runs on PDAs and guides analysts when gathering requirements. We report on experiences and lessons learned when using the MSP in various locations such as ski slopes, airports, and office environments for discovering requirements in diverse domains such as environmental protection, mobile navigation systems, or knowledge management.
"Brainstorming Potential Attacks with Executable Misuse Cases"
Jon Whittle, Lancaster University
Misuse cases are a way of modeling negative scenarios, that is, scenarios that should not occur in a system. In particular, they can be used to model potential attacks on a system as well as the security mechanisms needed to avoid them. However, like use cases, misuse cases describe requirements in a high-level and informal manner. This means that, whilst they are easy to understand, they do not lend themselves to testing or analysis. In this talk, I present a technique for brainstorming potential misuse scenarios using executable scenario models. An executable environment allows stakeholders to develop potential attack scenarios, consider possible mitigation scenarios, and then playback the scenarios immediately to see if they have the desired effect. The talk, supported by a UML-based modeling tool, describes an application to two case studies, providing evidence that the technique can support brainstorming of security scenarios for realistic systems.
Case Studies
"Using Scenarios to Discover Requirements for Aircraft Engine Control Systems"
Alistair Mavin, Rolls-Royce
Rolls-Royce Control Systems are complex, safety critical and developed in ever-compressed timescales. Scenario techniques are used during systems design, safety analysis and systems verification. Scenarios can be used to improve requirements quality and to ensure greater confidence in requirements coverage for both normal and exception behaviour. The ART-SCENE scenario process and tool were used to assist engineers in identifying exception behaviours earlier in the system design process, thus reducing cost and improving quality. ART-SCENE provides automatic generation of scenarios and alternative course events through the Scenario Presenter. These recognition cues were used to prompt engineers to identify deviations that may otherwise be missed. This presentation describes a comparative evaluation between ART-SCENE and a standard hazard identification technique to assess the effectiveness of this approach.
"Using Storyboards in Requirements Processes"
Neil Maiden, City University London
Storyboards are one form of scenario that is being increasingly used in requirements processes. Storyboards borrow techniques from film script writing to depict stories of the future use of a system’s use in textual and graphical form. This presentation will report how storyboards have been used with creativity techniques to discover requirements and requirements-related ideas during early requirements processes to provide a baseline for use case authoring during later processes. It will present storyboards developed during requirements processes in different air traffic management projects, and report benefits that arose from these storyboards.
The Speakers
Ian Alexander is an independent consultant specialising in Requirements Engineering. He has worked with organisations in transportation, telecommunications, aerospace, government and public service in the UK and around the world. He is the lead author of Writing Better Requirements (Addison-Wesley, 2002) and of Scenarios, Stories, Use Cases (Wiley, 2004). He is currently writing Discovering Requirements, to be published by Wiley in 2009. He edits the newsletter (Requirements Quarterly) of the RESG. He is a Chartered Engineer.
Neil Maiden is Professor of Systems Engineering and Head of the Centre for Human-Computer Interface Design, an independent research department in City University's School of Informatics. He has been directing inter-disciplinary research in requirements engineering for 15 years and has worked on numerous EPSRC- and EU-funded research projects. He has over 120 papers in journals and conference and workshop publications. He was Program Chair for the 12th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering in Kyoto in 2004. He is the Editor of the IEEE Software’s Requirements column. Details are available from www-hcid.soi.city.ac.uk.
Paul Grünbacher is an Associate Professor at Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU) and a visiting associate at the Center for Software Engineering at the University of Southern California. He is currently heading the product line engineering research group in the Christian Doppler Laboratory on Automated Software Engineering at JKU. His research interests include requirements engineering, collaborative software processes, product line engineering, and value-based approaches in software engineering. He has published more than 50 scientific papers as conference-, journal-, and book contributions. He regularly serves as a reviewer to leading international journals and conferences.
Alistair Mavin is a control systems engineer at Rolls-Royce in Derby. Prior to joining Rolls-Royce he carried out requirements engineering projects in a range of industries including defence, aerospace, rail, automotive and local government. He has experience in the development and delivery of requirements engineering training. Alistair has published papers on requirements engineering and contributed a case study chapter to "Scenarios, Stories, Use Cases" (I. Alexander and N. Maiden) (John Wiley 2004). He co-presented (with Ian Alexander) a tutorial "Developing Practical Scenarios" at RE04 in Kyoto. He is a chartered engineer and a committee member of the British Computer Society's Requirements Engineering Specialist Group.
Jon Whittle joined Lancaster University in August 2007 as a Professor of Software Engineering. Previously, he was an Associate Professor at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA, and, prior to that, he was a researcher and contractor technical area lead at NASA Ames Research Center. In July 2007, he was awarded a Wolfson Merit Award from the Royal Society. Jon’s research interests are in model-driven software development, formal methods, secure software development, requirements engineering and domain-specific methods for software engineering. His research has been recognized by a number of Best Paper awards, including the IEE Software Premium prize.
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