  Requirements Engineering (RE) is closely tied to other development activities
and is at the heart and foundation of every software development process. This
makes RE the most data and communication-intensive activity compared to other
development tasks. The highly demanding communication makes task switching and
interruptions inevitable in RE activities. While task switching often allows us
to perform tasks effectively, it imposes a cognitive load and can be
detrimental to the primary task, particularly in complex tasks as the ones
typical for RE activities. Visualization mechanisms enhanced with analytical
methods and interaction techniques help software developers obtain a better
cognitive understanding of the complexity of RE decisions, leading to timelier
and higher quality decisions. In this paper, we propose to apply interactive
visual analytics techniques for managing requirements decisions from various
perspectives, including stakeholders communication, RE task switching, and
interruptions. We propose a new layered visualization framework that supports
the analytical reasoning process of task switching. This framework consists of
both data analysis and visualization layers. The visual layers offer
interactive knowledge visualization components for managing task interruption
decisions at different stages of an interruption (i.e. before, during, and
after). The analytical layers provide narrative knowledge about the
consequences of task switching decisions and help requirements engineers to
recall their reasoning process and decisions upon resuming a task. Moreover, we
surveyed 53 software developers to test our visual prototype and to explore
more required features for the visual and analytical layers of our framework.
