Visual Analytics for Requirements-driven Risk Assessment

Risk assessment is a complex decision making process during certification and accreditation (C&A) activities. It requires to understand the multidimensional correlations among numerous C&A requirements to reason about their collective and adequate behavior to minimize risks to a software system. Also, diverse stakeholders in the organizational hierarchy should be able to comprehend and utilize the risk assessment artifacts to agree upon an acceptable level of risks and justify the criticality and cost of mitigation strategies related to C&A requirements. We believe requirements visualization plays an important role in providing rich contextual information for understanding and analyzing risk assessment artifacts and present our initial experiences in using intuitive visual metaphors and their explanations for requirements-driven risk assessment.