Visualizing non-functional requirements

Abstract

Information systems can be visualized with many tools. Typically these tools present functional artifacts from various phases of the development life-cycle; these include requirements models, architecture and design diagrams, and implementation code. The syntactic structures of these artifacts are often presented in a textual language using symbols, or a graphical one using nodes and edges. In this paper, we propose a quality-based visualization scheme. Such a scheme is layered on top of these functional artifacts for presenting non-functional aspects of the system. To do this, we use quantified quality attributes. As an example, we visualize the quality attributes of trust and performance among various non-functional requirements of information systems. © 2006 IEEE.