Improved representation of traceability links in requirements engineering knowledge using Sunburst and Netmap visualizations

Abstract

The representation of traceability links in requirements knowledge is vital to improve the general understanding of requirements as well as the relevance and consequences of relations between requirements artifacts and other artifacts in software engineering. Various visualization techniques have been developed to support the representation of traceability information, e.g. traceability matrices, graphs and tree structures. However, these techniques do not scale well on large amounts of artifacts and often do not provide additional functionality to present supplementary data. In this paper, we use Sunburst and Netmap visualizations as alternative visualization techniques. These techniques perform well even on large amounts of artifacts and traceability links. Moreover, they provide the ability to present derivative data. An implementation of the visualizations was developed in conjunction with a requirements plugin for the Redmine project management platform. In this paper, the applicability of Sunburst and Netmap visualizations for requirements engineering knowledge is illustrated by applying it to an example project and the results are compared to traditional visualization techniques. © 2011 IEEE.