The Russian writer Ivan Turgenev wrote (in Fathers and Sons in 1862), “A picture shows me at a glance what it takes dozens of pages of a book to expound.”
Text + 
= Complete & Unambiguous Requirements
Traditionally the trend has been to document requirements specifications as bulleted or numbered lists
In time-starved work environments, teams rarely have time to go through the requirements line by line documented in multiple pages. Result – lots of details are intially over looked and then uncovered later in the product development life cycle. This leads to rework and increases the cost of software development.
Some benefits of requirements visualization and simulation are:
- Requirements are easily undernstood
- Users are more engaged in requirements definition process and are more likely to provide feedback
- It is much easier to identify missing requirements and gaps
General argument against requirements visualization is that it is much more work.
Our take – though it might take little longer to create a wireframe or mock up, than to write few paragraphs, you make up for the time spent on visualization by reducing rework related requirements gaps and defects.
We do agree that it might not be practical to visualize all the requirements, however combining visualization with text descriptions can enable better communications and reduce defects related to requirements.
Some of the requirements that can be potential for visualization are:
- User Interface Navigation Flow Diagram or Story boards to capture flow. This can enable you to model the high-level relationships between major user interface elements and thereby ask fundamental questions.
- User interface (UI) prototyping. This requirement artifact can help in high-level requirements envisioning early in the project to help team come to a common understanding as to the scope of what you’re trying to accomplish. Plus tools like Clariys can help you associate business rules, constraints etc. with individual UI elements such as buttons, hyperlinks
What do you think are the other requirements type that work better when visualized?