Scenario support for effective requirements

Scenarios are widely used as requirements, and the quality of requirements is an important factor in the efficiency and success of a development project. The informal nature of scenarios requires that analysts do much manual work with them, and much tedious and detailed effort is needed to make a collection of scenarios well-defined, relatively complete, minimal, and coherent. We discuss six aspects of scenarios having inherent structure on which automated support may be based, and the results of using such support. This automated support frees analysts to concentrate on tasks requiring human intelligence, resulting in higher-quality scenarios for better system requirements. Two studies validating the work are presented.