Guidelines for better scenarios: supporting theories and evidence

Today different types of scenario are used to support a diverse range of requirements engineering tasks. However, little is understood about how to design scenarios and their usage sessions to support these different tasks. This paper presents SACRE, a theoretically-grounded framework which supports a requirements engineering team to design and use scenarios. As well as reporting empirical findings which highlight the importance of designing scenarios to fit the task, it describes findings from disciplines such as cognitive science and knowledge engineering which inform scenario design through guidelines. It ends with proposals to better design scenarios.