Scenarios Define Problem

Problem: Design documents are often ineffective as vehicles to communicate the customer vision of how the system should work.

Context:

You want to engage the customer and need a mechanism to support other organizati onal alliances between customer and developers.

Forces:

There is a natural business distancing and mistrust between customers and developers.

Communication between developers and customers is crucial to the success of a system.

Solution:

Capture system functional requirements as use cases, a la Jacobson.

Resulting Context:

The problem is now defined, and the architecture can proceed in earnest. See also Mercenary Analyst, who captures scenarios and uses them for project documentation (both internal an d external).

Design Rationale:

Jacobson; also CACM Nov. `88 (v. 31, no. 11) pp 1268-1287, according to Ralph Johnson. Also Rubin and Goldberg, who take scenarios all the way to the front of the process, preceding even design. See also, "Formal Approach to Scenario Analysis," Pei Hsia, Jayaranan Samuel, Jerry Gao, and David Kung, IEEE Software, March, 1994, Vol. 11, No. 2, ff 33.

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