Beyond Documents: Visualizing Informal Communication

Requirements engineering heavily relies on oral and informal communication like meetings, phone calls, and e-mails. Some requirements are traditionally communicated outside formal documents in many companies. Considering document-based communication only is, therefore, not sufficient. Communication beyond documents should be taken into account when a company wants to improve its requirements engineering practices. We present a notation for visualizing the flow of requirements, explicitly including both informal and document-based communication. An example illustrates the notation by applying it to eliciting and validating security requirements. We compare our visualization approach for flows of requirements to related notations. The comparison shows how differences in notations affect the ability to model essential concepts of our approach. Explicitly modeling flows beyond documents provides new opportunities for requirement awareness, process improvement and innovation of tools and techniques.