Visualizing non-functional requirements

Abstract

Information systems can be visualized with many tools. Typically these tools present functional artifacts from various phases of the development life-cycle; these include requirements models, architecture and design diagrams, and implementation code. The syntactic structures of these artifacts are often presented in a textual language using symbols, or a graphical one using nodes and edges. In this paper, we propose a quality-based visualization scheme. Such a scheme is layered on top of these functional artifacts for presenting non-functional aspects of the system. To do this, we use quantified quality attributes. As an example, we visualize the quality attributes of trust and performance among various nonfunctional requirements of information systems.