An Evaluation of Scenario Notations for Telecommunication Systems Development

The elicitation, modeling and analysis of requirements have consistently been one of the main challenges during the development of complex systems. Telecommunication systems belong to this category of systems due to the worldwide distribution and the heterogeneity of today’s telecommunication networks. Many proposals have been made for approaches that allow the developer to describe system behavior. Scenarios and use cases represent one such approach that has become popular for the capturing and analysis of requirements. However, little research has been done that compares different approaches and assesses their suitability for the telecommunications domain. This paper defines evaluation criteria for scenario notations and then uses these criteria to review twelve scenario notations. In addition, nineteen approaches for the construction of more detailed and integrated design models from scenarios are briefly compared. Such models enable further analysis and pave the way towards automated generation of implementations. Hopes and challenges related to scenario-based development of telecommunication systems are finally discussed.