Graph-based Visualization of Requirements Relationships

Understanding the relationships between requirements is important in order to understand the requirements themselves. Existing requirements management tools mainly use lists, tables, trees, and matrices to visualize requirements and their interrelations. However, all these visualization forms have a limited capability to show multiple relationships of different types. In this paper, we propose to extend traditional requirements analysis and management by a graph-based visualization that allows to represent multidimensional relations in a direct and flexible way. In particular, we propose a special presentation form that enables the exploration of requirements along their relationships and facilitates understanding of dependencies between requirements.