A Multimedia Approach to Problem Descriptions for Fine-Grained Detail Characterization

Requirements analysis has always been regarded as the starting point and focus of requirements engineering. The Problem Frames (PF) approach provides a problem-oriented requirements analysis method by describing the software's operating environment in detail. It can effectively bridge the gap between requirements analysis and system design. However, an intuitive and convenient means of elaborating the rich details of complex requirements and their contexts is missing from the literature. Currently, the main methods for describing requirements are through textual descriptions or formal language descriptions, which can result in the PF model containing a large amount of textual representations, and increasing the difficulty and time required for user understanding. In this paper, we present the PF2Detail, a tool that enables fine-grained descriptions of the PF model. Building upon the PF model construction, PF2Detail incorporates multimedia to describe complex requirements in context. Each node in the model can include multimedia, text, or formal language to provide detailed characterizations. Additionally, users can view detailed information about any node in the model and navigate the entire model, aiming to enhance the level of details in the PF model descriptions.