Visualization of conceptual specifications

The development of a large information system is generally regarded as one of the most complex activities undertaken by organisations. A key factor to the success of this activity is improvements in communication and understanding among the actors of the system (i.e. managers, developers, etc.). Accordingly, a crucial factor is the level of support provided for the interaction process between the people involved during the requirements engineering process. Animation is a multiple graphical view of a process in action. Animation has been successfully employed in programming for designing, developing and debugging programs or monitoring their performance. This paper advocaes that many benefits can be accrued from the use of visualisation for the purpose of providing an indication of the dynamic behaviour of specifications, during the validation phase of Requirements Engineering. To this end, the paper describes a visualization system which makes use of three interrelated conceptual models and their metamodel represented uniformly in a repository and an animation algorithm which generates graphical views corresponding to the behaviour of an application domain as specified by the conceptual models.

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