Exploring views for goal-oriented requirements comprehension

Abstract

Requirements documents and models need to be used by many stakeholders with different technological proficiency during software development. Each stakeholder may need to understand the entire (or simply part of the) requirements artifacts. To empower these stakeholders, views of the requirements should be configurable to their particular needs. This paper uses information visualization techniques to help in this process. It proposes different views aiming at highlighting information that is relevant for a particular stakeholder, helping him to query requirements artifacts. We offer three kinds of visualizations capturing language and domain elements, while providing a gradual model overview: the big picture view, the syntax-based view, and the concern-based view. We instantiate these views with i* models and introduce an implementation prototype in the iStarLab tool.