ScenIC (Scenario-based Inquiry Cycle) is the MORALE requirements determination method. ScenIC is the name of a process. It has prototype and planned automated support, but is not that support.
To support mission-oriented system evolution, ScenIC requirements are described in of mission goals, potential obstacles to those goals, and the actors responsible for accomplishing them. Actors include both system components (or the system as a whole) and environmental actors over which the developers have only partial influence. These include users, organizations (including those hostile to the mission), physical systems and devices, external software systems, and the natural environment. In ScenIC, there are two ways to describe a system in these terms: semantic descriptions and episodic descriptions. Generally, both are used, with the balance between the two being affected by the objectives of the design team and the criticality of the system. Semantic descriptions consist of a collection of goal, action and obstacle descriptions. Detailed descriptions of the goals allocated to the system therefore form a standard black-box requirements specification. Episodic descriptions are collections of scenarios of intended system behavior. Unlike semantic descriptions, these are highly concrete and context-rich descriptions, but their parts (episodes) are directly related to the goals and obstacles of the semantic description. The "Inquiry Cycle" of the name ScenIC comes from the incremental process of raising and addressing issues or questions during the requirements elaboration process. At any time, many issues may have been raised but not yet resolved or resolved but not yet acted on. This temporary status information collectively provides a third, tentative body of information about the system. By analogy with human memory, these three bodies of information about the system are referred to as the project's semantic memory, its episodic memory, and its working memory, each with a schema defining its component types and structure (WARNING: these schemas are being revised):A postscript version of a conference submission is available on the ScenIC method. (The figures are more up-to-date than those above.)
A product brochure for the ScenIC View tool (see below) is available in Adobe Acrobat format.
The linked example is a ScenIC rendition of a scenario created by Barry Boehm for illustrating EDCS technology integration.
Tool support for ScenIC includes editing, viewing and process-oriented annotation of scenarios (ScenIC View), process-aware reminding (ScenIC Ride), and natural-language input (Scenify).