Business Scenarios

What Is a Business Scenario in ArchRepo?

A Business Scenario is an end-to-end narrative of how the solution will be used in a real-world business situation. It describes who is involved, what triggers the scenario, the sequence of events from start to finish, what can go wrong, and what state the business is in when it completes.

Examples of Business Scenarios:

“AP Clerk processes a matched invoice for payment”
“New supplier onboarded and purchase order raised”
“Customer submits an urgent order outside normal business hours”
“Finance Manager rejects an invoice due to a discrepancy”

Business Scenarios are referenced using the prefix BS- — BS-1, BS-2, and so on.

Scenarios, Use Cases, and Business Processes

These three item types are closely related but serve different purposes:

Item	What it describes
Business Process	What the business does — the repeatable activities the organisation performs to achieve an outcome
Business Scenario	How the solution is used in a specific end-to-end business situation — a real-world story from trigger to completion
Use Case	A discrete actor-system interaction — a single, bounded thing an actor does with the solution

A Business Scenario typically follows one or more Business Processes and invokes multiple Use Cases. It is the most narrative and business-facing of the three: it tells the story of a real situation, end-to-end, as a stakeholder would experience it. Use Cases break that story into individual system interactions; Business Processes describe the organisational activities that surround them.

Scenario Structure

Each Business Scenario is composed of several parts:

Part	What it captures
Description	A brief title or summary of the scenario
Business Context	The broader business situation in which this scenario occurs
Actors	The business roles, systems, or external parties involved
Trigger Events	The events that initiate the scenario
Preconditions	The state that must be true before the scenario begins
Main Flow	The happy-path sequence of events from start to finish
Alternative Flows	Valid variations to the main flow
Exception Flows	Error handling and edge cases — what happens when things go wrong
Postconditions	The state of the business after the scenario completes

Not every scenario needs every section populated from the start. Begin with Description, Actors, and Main Flow, then enrich the other sections as the scenario is elaborated.

Priority

Each Business Scenario has a priority of High, Medium, or Low. Priority reflects how important it is that this scenario is fully specified and tested before delivery. Ensure all High-priority scenarios are fully elaborated — with flows, acceptance criteria, and stakeholder sign-off — before spending effort on Medium-priority scenarios.

Approval

Business Scenarios support formal approval. Once a scenario is agreed with the business or customer, the approval workflow records that it has been reviewed and signed off. This is particularly useful when scenarios are used as the basis for acceptance testing — a signed-off scenario provides an agreed baseline for what the test must demonstrate.

Traceability

Scenarios are linked to the rest of the architecture through two key relationships:

Implements Business Requirement — links each scenario to the requirements it covers; the Scenarios v Requirements collection view provides a completeness check, ensuring every requirement is covered by at least one scenario
Uses Use Case — links each scenario to the use cases it invokes; the Scenarios v Use Cases view shows how scenarios are composed of use cases

Hierarchical Scenarios

A Business Scenario can contain other Business Scenarios, allowing complex situations to be decomposed into a hierarchy of more focused sub-scenarios. Use this when a high-level scenario is too large or complex to elaborate in a single item — define the parent scenario at a summary level, then link its child scenarios using the Contains Business Scenario relationship.

For example, a parent scenario “Supplier onboarded and integrated with procurement system” might contain child scenarios for “Supplier details verified and approved”, “Supplier connected to purchase order workflow”, and “First test purchase order raised and confirmed”.

The parent scenario provides the end-to-end narrative; the child scenarios provide the detail.

Fields Reference

See Business Scenario Fields for a description of each field and guidance on what to record.