Keeping requirements on track via visual analytics

Abstract

For many software projects, keeping requirements on track needs an effective and efficient path from data to decision. Visual analytics creates such a path that enables the human to extract insights by interacting with the relevant information. While various requirements visualization techniques exist, few have produced end-to-end values to practitioners. In this paper, we advance the literature on visual requirements analytics by characterizing its key components and relationships. This allows us to not only assess existing approaches, but also create tool enhancements in a principled manner. We evaluate our enhanced tool supports through a case study where massive, heterogeneous, and dynamic requirements are processed, visualized, and analyzed. In particular, our study illuminates how increased interactivity of requirements visualization could lead to actionable decisions.

Visual analytics for software requirements engineering

“…The continuous and expanded case study gives us the advantage of researching and developing a more complete spectrum of VA supports for RE. Relating to the visual exploration findings that we reported in [83], the extended work 4 here shows that visual exploitation is best performed in a concrete task (e.g., risk assessment) where a relatively well-structured process is defined. Another important extension is that Section 3.3 assesses the contemporary VA approaches more comprehensively and by following our framework more systematically.…”

“…In this dissertation, we used the framework to guide the development of tool supports mainly for visual exploration tasks, including overviewing the requirements space, uncovering requirements-level themes, mapping stakeholder concerns, and identifying outliers that exhibit anomalous aspects from the majority of the requirements [83].…”

“…One of the RE tasks that we found VA could potentially facilitate (namely "causality" which involves semantic analysis, exploratory reasoning, and multivariate comparison [83]) was not completed at the time our previous work was presented. In this dissertation, we coherently leverage the framework to fully realize VA's causality potential by expanding the case study to the area of requirements-driven risk assessment that our industrial partner finds to be important.…”

Software traceability: trends and future directions

“…To achieve this goal, Niu et al [72] developed a framework for assessing the e↵ectiveness of visualizations for supporting decision-making activities, based upon how users interact with the visualization to augment their knowledge, and then used the framework to critique existing visualizations and propose the principled development of new ones.…”

Usability Insights for Requirements Engineering Tools: A User Study with Practitioners in Aeronautics

“…Niu et al [38] identify the interactive visualization of requirements as an interesting technique for exploration, knowledge discovery and efficient reasoning. They apply a visual analytics-oriented framework to compare 8 interactive visualizations.…”