Visualizing Requirements in UML Models

As the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and modeldriven development (MDD) become increasingly common in industry, many developers are faced with the difficult task of understanding how an existing UML model realizes system requirements. Essentially, developers are required to understand the structure and behavior of UML models that they may have not created. Understanding these relationships is non-trivial, because the interactions in the model are not readily apparent. Commonly, the only means to elicit these relationships is visual inspection and guided simulation. This paper describes an alternative approach termed REVU (Requirements Visualization of UML), a process for visualizing functional requirements in terms of behavioral interactions in a UML model. We illustrate the use of this process with the visualization of scenarios for an adaptive light control system.