Experiences with scenario based architecting
L.J.G. Vrijnsen, C. Delnooz, Lou Somers, Dieter K. Hammer · TU/e Research Portal · 2003
This paper presents the results of a project conducted in the Research Department of Océ Technologies. Here, many ideas are waiting to be explored, preferably by means of a prototype on a real product. To facilitate such prototyping activities, a framework was constructed. This framework faced the classical problem of software engineering: the many stakeholders have very different ideas on what the framework should be, and no one is able to write down proper and stable requirements. If we apply traditional software engineering techniques and write down requirements to be implemented, little guarantee can be given about the end result: it is indeed what was specified, but now that people can play with it, they find out that those specifications are not quite right. We explore an alternative approach. First, we want to achieve stable understanding of what the stakeholders expect from the system. Usually, there is no alignment between the various stakeholders about the problem, let alone about the solution. As a result, requirements keep changing during the realization. Secondly, we want to transform this knowledge into a solution that meets all expectations (a “good architecture”). Often, a big gap exists between the formulated requirements and the resulting system. Partially, this gap can be explained by incomplete requirements, but there is a need for methods that help to manage the complexity of a software design as well.