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Presentation

Scenarios for Software Specification

Presenter: Prof. Thomas A. Alspaugh

Abstract: Scenarios are an effective way to specify a system's behavior informally, approximately, and partially, and as a starting point for uncovering system requirements and goals. However, scenarios are also problematic; the context of an individual scenario is often difficult to deduce, and it is challenging to determine whether a collection of scenarios covers all the important behaviors. Scenario Networks address both these problems by specifying each scenario's context in terms of the scenarios that occur before, after, or during. A scenario network expresses the causal relationships among a system's scenarios, and equivalence classes of scenarios that are contextually equivalent. These relationships offer a behaviorally-based coverage criterion, and procedural guidance for improving the coverage.

Bio: Thomas A. Alspaugh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Informatics, School of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine, and a faculty member of the Institute for Software Research. He received the Ph.D. degree from North Carolina State University. His research is in the area of requirements engineering, and has focused on the use of scenarios for specifying system behavior. His work provided the first effective approach for dealing with the scenario management problem. Before beginning his Ph.D., he worked in industrial software development and as a member of the Software Cost Reduction project at the Naval Research Laboratory.