Product Introduction
It is a well-known fact that a large percentage of software project failures are attributed to problems related to requirements. Requirements can be ambiguous, inconsistent, incomplete, volatile, and above all, easily interpreted differently and subjectively by the individual stakeholders during development, review, and validation. The "I'll know it when I see it" (IKIWISI) phenomenon explains how being tangible can be important for requirements development and validation.
Softscore consisting of two interdependent parts: the assorted requirements information and a synthesized presentation of the assorted information delivered interactively in a highly tangible context that allows the stakeholders to develop, review, and validate requirements.
Five categories of information are collected in Softscore:
Presentation
Navigation
Field constraints
Business logic
Test case
Between two scenes, a transition relationship can be specified depending on how the story line is taken on. On each scene, presentation requirements, navigational moves, field constraints, business logic, and test cases are specified and weaved into their corresponding position.
For Example, in figure 1, the high level scene map of the storyboard for the given scenario produced with SoftScore. Each rounded rectangle represents a scene in the storyboard and the scene-to-scene transitions are depicted with arrows. The rectangles on the right hand side of the map represent external scene maps or can be viewed as sub scene maps.
In Figure 2 illustrated how to define a scene using the example, where in the "HR Strategy Map" scene, HR manager can maintain the company’s strategy in a master-detail GUI structure. In the detail view of data grid, the field constraints and test cases for each column can be specified and retrieved by right clicking the mouse as indicated in the arrows 2.1 and 2.2 of Figure 2.
In continuing, the transition between two scenes is illustrated, see Figure 3. Let us assume that the scenes "HR Strategy Map" and "Digital Dashboard" are completed. Navigation from scene "HR Strategy Map" to the next scene "Digital Dashboard" is accomplished by clicking the tree menu in the left panel of the application. When the menu is pressed, as indicated in arrows 3.1 and 3.2 of Figure 3, the business logic to generate the indicators for the digital dashboard and the test cases for these rules are shown for stakeholders to validate the correctness. When validation is done, the "Digital Dashboard" is displayed to represent its invocation in the application as indicated by arrow 3.3 of Figure 3.
Requirements development is hard; it is even harder where piecemeal growth approaches are not applicable. Softscore has been developed with these points in mind. A requirements development and validation tool has been built around the concept of Softscore.
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