Visualizing requirements: A three dimensional pyramid representation

High level requirements that describe the various objectives to be met by a system may not always be fully comprehensible, especially when expressed in textual form. The possibilities of misinterpreting requirements, and missing out on grasping the contextual information associated with requirements increase with several factors. Some of these causes include the volume of interaction between related requirements that affect various stakeholders, the number of communication channels between stakeholders, and the number of stakeholder groups involved in the project. Representing a requirement in one form or the other often results in certain requirement characteristics or attributes not being depicted. In this paper, we propose a novel and intuitive concept of visualizing a given set of requirements (functional or non-functional) for a product or system at various levels of refinement granularity. This sort of representation of requirements would lead to better understanding and analysis of requirements, and simultaneously illustrate multidirectional traceability from the top-most high level requirements right down to requirements at the lowest level of granularity between the layers of refinement in the model.