Creativity techniques have been applied to Requirements Engineering (RE) in order to find novel requirements, facilitating system and business innovation. Creativity has typically been applied to RE as part of an intensive, often multi-day workshop. Ideas are generated and recorded in a free-form, manual fashion, with much guidance from experienced human facilitators. Although this format has been successful, economic, time, and geographical pressures make this intensive process less feasible. The free-form representation of creative output (text and informal diagrams) provides flexibility in order to support creative thought, but the output of this form is not able to take advantage of much of the (semi-) automated analysis developed for RE, including trade-off analysis. In this work we address two major challenges 1) the limitations of existing creativity RE workshops, particularly their costliness and need for expert guidance, and 2) capturing creative output in a structured form, better amenable to (semi-) automated analysis and downstream development. We address these as part of a 2-3 year project focusing on integrating RE creativity techniques with conceptual modeling techniques such as goal modeling, with a focus on developing online, distributed creative support tools for RE.
['Jennifer Horkoff', 'Neil A. M. Maiden']
Creativity and conceptual modeling for requirements engineering