Creativity and conceptual modeling for requirements engineering
Jennifer Horkoff, Neil Maiden · City Research Online (City University London) · 2015
Abstract. Creativity techniques have been applied to Requirements Engineer-ing (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. Alt-hough this format has been successful, economic, time, and geographical pres-sures make this intensive process less feasible. The free-form representation of creative output (text and informal diagrams) provides flexibility in order to sup-port 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 ex-isting 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. 1