ScenarioML

ScenarioML is a language for modelling scenarios. It provides syntax for expressing the semantic distinctions that are present in scenarios, and semantics for the things that people use and respond to consistently in scenarios. By providing means for distinguishing the kinds of things we say in scenarios, and making explicit the assumed semantics in informal scenarios, it forms an effective, flexible, and extensible basis for recording and working with scenarios. The scenarios can then be translated into other forms, used as part of other applications, transformed into HTML for presentation in a web browser or into LATEX for presentation on the printed page, and analyzed, refactored, and manipulated using Java tools.

Publications:

Thomas A. Alspaugh, Susan Elliott Sim, Kristina Winbladh, Mamadou Diallo, Hadar Ziv, and Debra J. Richardson. The Importance of Clarity in Usable Requirements Specification Formats. CERE'07, October 2007.
Kristina Winbladh, Thomas A. Alspaugh, Hadar Ziv, and Debra J. Richardson. An Automated Approach for Goal-driven, Specification-based Testing. ASE'06, September 2006.
Thomas A. Alspaugh, Eric Baumer, and Bill Tomlinson. On a Mixed-Methods Evaluation of a Social-Agent Scenario Visualization. CERE'06, September 2006.
Thomas A. Alspaugh, Bill Tomlinson, and Eric Baumer. Using Social Agents to Visualize Software Scenarios. SOFTVIS'06, September 2006.
Eric Baumer, Bill Tomlinson, Man Lok Yau, and Thomas Alspaugh. Normative Echoes: use and manipulation of player generated content by communities of NPCs. AIIDE 2006, June 2006.

Scenario Workbench

The Scenario Workbench is the culmination (to date) of a group of languages, tools, and techniques for working effectively with scenarios written in ScenarioML:

The Scenario Workbench, an Eclipse plugin under development (primarily by Ph.D. student Mamadou Diallo) and supported by an IBM Eclipse Innovation Award.
A Java package scenario for representing ScenarioML scenarios as Java objects, operating on them, and translating to/from their several representations.
ScenarioGraph, a Java tool written by Ph.D. student Mamadou Diallo, for editing and analyzing graphs of events.
GoalML, an XML language developed by Ph.D. student Kristina Winbladh for goal-driven specification based testing, and several Java tools supporting it.
A special-purpose Java package used by collaborator Bill Tomlinson and his students.

The goals of the Scenario Workbench are:

to help people to do the things they currently do with scenarios, but more easily, with higher quality, and more effectively;
to extend the things people do with scenarios, by opening new possibilities that were too difficult, error-prone, tedious, or time-consuming to do before; and
to provide software tools to support these tasks.