Crews: Towards Systematic Usage of Scenarios, Use Cases and Scenes

In the wake of object-oriented software engineering, use cases have gained enormous popularity as tools for bridging the gap between electronic business management and information systems engineering. A wide variety of practices has emerged but their relationships to each other, and with respect to the traditional change management process, are poorly understood. The ESPRIT Long Term Research Project CREWS (Cooperative Requirements Engineering With Scenarios) has conducted surveys of the research literature and of the industry practice in scenario-based requirements engineering as a basis to develop a framework of approaches and research issues in the field. In two demonstrator prototypes, one based on textual scenario representations, the other on multimedia scenes, solutions to some of the most critical open problems from these surveys are being explored. The project results, besides being integrated in leading commercial software engineering environments, feed into a component-oriented method server on the Internet.