On Requirements Visualization

This paper summarizes the typical objectives and process of visualization and highlights the primary areas in which visualization systems and artifacts have been used to support requirements engineering activities to date. The paper suggests that the field has yet to realize some of the benefits that can arise from a well designed and task-oriented information visualization, falling behind other areas of software engineering in which visualization has been used to better effect. By way of an exemplar, the paper proposes the need for a way to visualize the multi-dimensional nature of requirements to help bring about a shared and rapid comprehension on the health of a project's requirements, and so support various diagnostic activities and decision making tasks during software development. It examines how new ways to 'see' the requirements could be developed, based on metaphor and mapping, provides some samples, and outlines a research agenda to explore a vision related to requirements sensing.