We've had some problems with the somewhat loose wording that sneaked in to the MSF Glossary in the process guidance. The in-the-box wording has conjured up a lot of use case type imagery and confused a lot of people. We'll be correcting the definition in the next release of the guidance. In the meantime, here is the new definition.

scenario

A type of work item, describing a specific usage of the envisaged software system by a particular persona. Scenarios should be goal directed. As a persona attempts to reach a goal, the scenario records the specific steps taken in attempting to reach that goal.

This new definition is intended to underline the origins of personas and usage scenarios from the human computer interaction and user experience design community. MSF is intended as a methodology that encourages good user experience and interaction design and is founded on requirements techniques from the user experience community. Specifically, personas originate from Alan Cooper and Kim Goodwin and Usage Scenarios from the HCI department at Virginia Tech. [As an interesting footnote: Alan Cooper was the creator of Visual Basic and by incorporating some of his work on user experience and interaction we are re-connecting with an old friend.] Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, MSF