Graph-Based Visualization of System Requirements Organized for Team-Based Design

Abstract

When requirements are organized into levels for team development, graph structures are needed to describe the comply and define relationships among requirements. Yet, a number of present-day requirements engineering tools employ a tree-based model to display relationships among requirements. While this strategy of development simplifies the details of implementation, it unfortunately also causes gaps to appear between the visual representation and the underlying graph-based data structures. Systems engineers currently use manual procedures to identify and close these gaps. To mitigate the limitations of this slow and error prone process, this report describes the formulation of algorithms and development of a Java-based requirements visualization tool called called PaladinRM. PaladinRM can read a tree representation of requirements exported from a database, and construct and visualize the block diagram representation with all duplicate nodes removed.