Skip to content

Scenario Construction Workbench

Run the Scenario Construction Workbench MicroSim Fullscreen
Edit in the p5.js Editor

About This MicroSim

A workbench for turning a general scenario template into a concrete, system-specific quality attribute scenario. Five tabs select a scenario family — Performance, Availability, Security, Modifiability, or Scalability — each with its own general template and a measure-field hint. As you fill the six scenario components, a live Completeness meter and an ATAM-Ready badge react to how specific and measurable your content is. Well-formed scenarios can be saved to a catalog to build a coverage set across quality attributes.

How to Use

  1. Pick a scenario family by clicking one of the five colored tabs.
  2. Load Template pre-fills a partially complete worked example — the Response Measure is intentionally left blank so you supply the quantitative bar.
  3. Fill the six components: Source, Stimulus, Environment, Artifact, Response, and Response Measure. The green/amber/red dot beside each field marks how specific it is.
  4. Evaluate Scenario shows per-component feedback (✓ Specific, ⚠ Add a quantitative measure, ✗ Too vague).
  5. Save to Catalog stores a well-formed scenario so you can build a set spanning several quality attributes.

A scenario reaches ATAM-Ready when every component is specific and the response measure is quantitative.

Iframe Embed Code

You can add this MicroSim to any web page by adding this to your HTML:

<iframe src="https://dmccreary.github.io/atam/sims/scenario-construction-workbench/main.html"
        width="100%"
        scrolling="no"></iframe>

Lesson Plan

Grade Level

Undergraduate / Professional

Duration

10-15 minutes

Prerequisites

Familiarity with the six-component quality attribute scenario model and the five quality attribute families used in ATAM.

Bloom's Taxonomy Level

Apply (L3)

Learning Objective

Students will be able to transform a general scenario template into a concrete, system-specific scenario with a quantitative response measure, for any of the five typed scenario families.

Activities

  1. Exploration (5 min): Students load a template for each quality attribute family and observe how the general template differs from a concrete scenario.
  2. Guided Practice (5 min): For two different families, students construct a scenario that reaches the ATAM-Ready badge, then Save it to the catalog.
  3. Discussion (5 min): Students compare catalogs and discuss why the response measure is the component that makes a scenario testable.

Assessment

Give students a vague goal ("the checkout should scale for Black Friday") and ask them to construct a Scalability scenario that reaches an ATAM-Ready (90%+) completeness score.

References

  1. Bass, L., Clements, P., & Kazman, R. (2021). Software Architecture in Practice (4th ed.). Addison-Wesley.
  2. Kazman, R., Klein, M., & Clements, P. (2000). ATAM: Method for Architecture Evaluation (CMU/SEI-2000-TR-004).