So one might ask: visualisation ? Requirements are texutal, semantic-rich objects, nothing which would come close to that what is needed to making charts or some interesting 3D pictures. Well, this may be right. But requirements have structure: they are related to other requirements, they build groups. In addition, they have an inner structure, if they are built using methods available for professional Requirement Engineering. Visualizing requirements related to such structure aspects would be the same as visualize the network or graph of requirements. Clusters or too sparse regions of the requirement network should be visible at once.
But I think, there could be done more. The set of requirements should describe as complete as possible the system to build or to engineer. This set as a whole should be able to induce the picture of software. By reading the requirements, one after one, this picture becomes existent in the mind of the reader, and its shape and details become more and more complete with every requirement read.
But: wouldn't it be nice to visualize exactly that process ?
In the result, this visualization would show which requirements covers to which extent which aspect of a system. For example, the system would be a landscape, or a city street plan, and the size and position of the requirements show there contribution to the whole (system).
Since a while, I asked myself if Croquet would be a optimal tool for such visualizations. The space metapher and even more the collaboration possibilities of Croquet seems promising for such visualization experiments. Unfortunatly, I have no time, so I really hope that some other will do some experiments in this direction.
This is I would do:
- defining a meta-model of requirements, to adress the aspect of their inner structure, just like EMOF for conventional models. I mean not a semantic model, only a structural model (Conditions, quantors, action, object, subject, test criteria ...)
- defining a meta-model for describing always needed aspects (=questions) for a software project, let's call it system meta model. You could imagine this as a checklist of questions need to be answered in most projects.
- defining a semantic meta model, to describe the relations between semantic in general, requirement parts, and the system meta model.
That are only raw ideas. Too bad, I had no time.....
