There are many possible ways to write scenarios. For this class, your scenarios should be written in prose, and should involve named people (e.g., "Mary", "John", not "User A" or "the user") performing concrete actions with the system. Be as specific as you can, since the process of filling in the details leads to questions whose answers yield an improved understanding of the system.
Requirements Engineering by Kotonya and Sommerville, states that scenarios typically include the following information:
Ideally, each scenario should cover a different aspect of the system's functionality, and together the scenarios should encompass the majority of the system's behavior.
Each scenario should have a title (typically the heading of that section) and then the textual description of the scenario.
Here is an example of a scenario for an HTML authoring tool called DistEdit:
1.2 Opening a Remote HTML Document
Jane, the maintainer of a web page, needs to update its HTML source. There are no other variants to this page, such as translations into other languages. Within DistEdit, she goes to the File ... Open menu option. The FileOpen dialog box appears. Jane clicks on the button labeled "Remote Sites," causing a list of previously defined remote Web sites to appear in the scroll window within the FileOpen dialog box. Additionally, a new button, "New Remote Site" appears.
Jane double-clicks on the name of an existing site, and (after authenticating herself, if necessary) is presented with a listing of the members of the top level directory of that site in the scroll windows. Jane selects an HTML document from those listed, and the dialog box disappears. DistEdit then locks the HTML document, and loads it into the HTML editor.
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