Visualizing requirements in distributed system development

Distributing the various phases of system development across multiple locations has posed several requirements-related challenges. These challenges directly and indirectly arise from the lack of opportunities for face to face communication and collaboration between project team members, while trying to obtain clarity on requirements. These concerns are more pronounced when the constituent sub-systems in a systems development effort are developed across various locations. Gauging the current `status' of requirements in such a setting is often cumbersome, especially when large volumes of written requirement documents have to be dealt with. Here, we describe a tool that was developed to pictorially visualize a large number of requirements at several levels of granularity, from the perspectives of different stakeholders in a project. The tool was used to capture and store a set of requirements for a sub-system of a healthcare product. We report the results of this experiment, and stress on the importance of supporting `decentralized' requirements engineering from the sub-system point of view.