Generating complete, unambiguous, and verifiable requirements from stories, scenarios, and use cases

Abstract

Simple scenarios and stories are typically used for requirements engineering in the Agile community (e.g., extreme Programming). Use case modeling has also been a popular requirements elicitation and analysis technique for many years. However, stories, scenarios, and use cases typically exhibit a great informality that violates the traditional guidance in the requirements engineering community that requirements should be complete, unambiguous, and verifiable. This is why many professional requirements engineers use these techniques only as tools for informal requirements elicitation, analysis, and validation. Instead during requirements analysis and specification, more experienced requirements engineers tend to develop and specify more formal textual requirements that are complete, unambiguous, and verifiable. This column will show how to transform incomplete and vague stories, scenarios, and use cases into a proper set of complete, unambiguous, and verifiable requirements.