Creative Goal Modeling for Innovative Requirements

Context: When determining the functions and qualities (a.k.a. requirements) for a system, creativity is key to drive innovation and foster business success. However, creative requirements must be practically operationalized, grounded in concrete functions and system interactions. Requirements Engineering (RE) has produced a wealth of methods centered around goal modeling, in order to graphically explore the space of alternative requirements, linking functions to goals and dependencies. In parallel work, creativity theories from the social sciences have been applied to the design of creative requirements workshops, pushing stakeholders to develop innovative systems. Goal models tend to focus on what is known, while creativity workshops are expensive, require a specific skill set to facilitate, and produce mainly paper-based, unstructured outputs. Objective: Our aim in this work is to explore beneficial combinations of the two areas of work in order to overcome these and other limitations, facilitating creative requirements elicitation, supported by a simple extension of a well-known and structured requirements modeling technique. Method: We take a Design Science approach, iterating over exploratory studies, design, and summative validation studies. Results: The result is the Creative Leaf tool and method supporting creative goal modeling for RE. Conclusion: We support creative RE by making creativity techniques more accessible, producing structured digital outputs which better match to existing RE methods with associated analysis procedures and transformations

Supporting creative RE with i∗

Successful software must be both useful and innovative. Techniques for Requirements Engineering (RE) have mainly focused on utility, with a prominent body of work using goal modeling and analysis to ensure that systems meet user goals. However, these techniques are not designed to foster creativity, meaning that resulting systems may be functionally useful but not sufficiently innovative. Further work has focused on applying creativity techniques for RE through workshops. However, the free-form representation of creative workshop outputs (text and informal diagrams), although flexible, is not grounded in user goals, or able to take advantage of goal model analysis, e.g., trade-off analysis. Furthermore, successfully conducting a creative RE workshop requires much experience and soft-skills, as well as a significant economic commitment. In this work, we summarize initial progress aiming to combine goal modeling and creativity techniques for enhanced RE. We focus on methods and tools for introducing creative ideas to goal modeling, and grounding creative outputs in goal-oriented models. Our focus on tooling and methods help to alleviate the need for expert-lead, costly workshops. We outline and illustrate proposed methods

Modeling the Structure and Complexity of Engineering Routine Design Problems

This paper proposes a model to structure routine design problems as well as a model of its design complexity. The idea is that having a proper model of the structure of such problems enables understanding its complexity, and likewise, a proper understanding of its complexity enables the development of systematic approaches to solve them. The end goal is to develop computer systems capable of taking over routine design tasks based on generic and systematic solving approaches. It is proposed to structure routine design in three main states: problem class, problem instance, and problem solution. Design complexity is related to the degree of uncertainty in knowing how to move a design problem from one state to another. Axiomatic Design Theory is used as reference for understanding complexity in routine design

Requirements Engineering as Creative Problem Solving: A Research Agenda for Idea Finding

This vision paper frames requirements engineering as a creative problem solving process. Its purpose is to enable requirements researchers and practitioners to recruit relevant theories, models, techniques and tools from creative problem solving to understand and support requirements processes more effectively. It uses 4 drivers to motivate the case for requirements engineering as a creative problem solving process. It then maps established requirements activities onto one of the longest-established creative problem solving processes, and uses these mappings to locate opportunities for the application of creative problem solving in requirements engineering. The second half of the paper describes selected creativity theories, techniques, software tools and training that can be adopted to improve requirements engineering research and practice. The focus is on support for problem and idea finding - two creative problem solving processes that our investigation revealed are poorly supported in requirements engineering. The paper ends with a research agenda to incorporate creative processes, techniques, training and tools in requirements projects

Introduction to TIPS: a theory for creative design

A highly intriguing problem in combining artificial intelligence and engineering design is automation of the creative and innovative phases of the design process. This paper gives a brief introduction to the theory of inventive problem solving (TIPS) selected as a theoretical basis of the authors' research efforts in this field. The research is conducted in the Stevin Project of the Knowledge-Based System Group of the University of Twente (Enschede, The Netherlands) in cooperation with the Invention Machine Laboratory (Minsk, Belarus). This collaboration aims at developing a formal basis for the creation of an automated reasoning system to support creative engineering design

Innovative methods of teaching and harmonization of educational standards in the sphere of computing

Competence-based approach to education (unlike traditional qualification) reflects requirements not only to the content of education, but also to a behavioral component. Recommendations about drawing up curricula for training of specialists in the computing sphere are considered. New pedagogical methods, proposing creative combination of the theory and practice which is reached in the course of direct professional activity are analyzed. The analysis of the problems arising at creation of educational standards is also given. It has shown that professional standards are primary link in high-quality training of various areas of economy specialists (including for computing area), and also ensuring their competitiveness have to be a basis for their development. Thus, problems when developing professional standards complicate prospect of harmonization of professional and educational standards which demands necessary methodological, methodical and expert completion at the first design stage

Innovation and Self-Leadership: The Effects of Self-Leadership Knowledge on the Innovation Landscape

The open innovation landscape of today allows any individual the ability to work, use their creative ideas, and receive external ideas for innovation. Innovators are no longer the chosen few behind closed doors who are at the right level in an organization, at the right place, and at the right time. The open innovation environment requires individuals who are self-leaders with the skills and abilities to lead innovation projects. This study explores how the organizational position of individuals can affect how they feel about innovation and their perception of their innovative abilities. This information can help to guide organizations on where to focus self-leadership awareness and training and to match individuals with high innovator natural tendencies and perceptions with those in an organization that need to build their self-leadership skills for innovation

Understanding business strategies of networked value constellations using goal- and value modeling

In goal-oriented requirements engineering (GORE), one usually proceeds from a goal analysis to a requirements specification, usually of IT systems. In contrast, we consider the use of GORE for the design of IT-enabled value constellations, which are collections of enterprises that jointly satisfy a consumer need using information technology. The requirements analysis needed to do such a crossorganizational design not only consists of a goal analysis, in which the relevant strategic goals of the participating companies are aligned, but also of a value analysis, in which the commercial sustainability of the constellation is explored. In this paper we investigate the relation between strategic goal- and value modeling. We use theories about business strategy such as those by Porter to identify strategic goals of a value constellation, and operationalize these goals using value models. We show how value modeling allows us to find more detailed goals, and to analyze conflicts among goals