Towards the Next Generation of Scenario Walkthrough Tools–A Research Preview

With the rise of cyber-physical systems (CPS), smart ecosystems, and the Internet of Things (IoT), software-intensive systems have become pervasive in everyone’s daily life. The shift from software systems to ubiquitous adaptive software-intensive systems not only affects the way we use software but further has an impact on the way these systems are designed and developed. Gathering requirements for such systems can benefit from elicitation processes that are conducted in the field with domain experts. More traditional elicitation approaches such as interviews or workshops exhibit limitations when it comes to gathering requirements for systems of this nature – often lacking an in-depth context analysis and understanding of contextual constraints which are easily missed in a formal elicitation setting. Furthermore, dedicated methods which focus on understanding the system context such as contextual design are not widely adopted by the industry as they are perceived to be time-consuming and cumbersome to apply. In this research preview paper we argue that scenario-based RE, scenario walkthrough approaches in particular, have the potential to support requirements elicitation for ubiquitous adaptive software-intensive systems through facilitating broader stakeholder involvement and enabling contextual requirements elicitation within the workplace of future system end-users. The envisioned on-site scenario walkthroughs can either be conducted by an analyst or by future end-users of the system themselves.