Requirements visualization

Abstract

Meeting user requirements of a software system has been a major challenge to software developers. Experience in a number of large projects reveals that a very large percentage of errors were made at the earlier stages of their development. Therefore, it is a well-accepted fact that it is crucial to express user requirements completely, correctly and unambiguously as possible. Many approaches have been applied to validate requirements, but most of them seem fit better to software developers than customers. In spite of their benefits, they often fail in the user validation process since they are based on formal notations not always comprehensible by users. So, in order to facilitate the comprehension by users, visualization techniques appear as an interesting alternative. Visualization techniques are a powerful tool to facilitate the analysis and understanding of complex information. In spite of the their successful in numerous computing areas, little research has been reported in the area of requirements visualization. In this work, we describe our current efforts towards the application of visualization techniques to achieve a more effective requirements validation process. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 explains visualization concepts and its benefits in the requirements validation domain. Section 3 describes the current project and identifies the different tasks involved in its development.