Grounding Scenarios in Frame-Based Action Semantics

Scenarios that describe concrete situations of software operation play an important role in software development, and in particular in requirements engineering. Scenario details should vary in content and detail when described from different viewpoints (e.g. types of user or external interface), but this presents a difficulty, because informal scenarios cannot easily be translated from one viewpoint to another with consistency and assurance. This paper describes (1) a language for describing scenarios in which simple action traces are embellished to include typed frames based on a simple case grammar of actions, and (2) a procedure for translating a frame-based scenario from one viewpoint into another. We illustrate both with examples from elevator control.