Integrating Creativity Workshops into Structured Requirements Processes

Requirements engineering is a creative process in which stakeholders and designers work together to create ideas for new systems that are eventually expressed as requirements. However, many requirements engineering or software development methods do not encourage or support creative thinking, let alone integrate it with existing modeling and analysis processes. This paper describes RESCUE, a scenario-driven requirements engineering process that includes workshops that integrate creativity techniques with different types of use case and system context modelling. It reports a case study in which RESCUE creativity workshops were used to discover stakeholder and system requirements for DMAN, a future air traffic management system for managing departures from major European airports. The workshop was successful in that it provided new and important outputs for subsequent requirements processes. The paper describes the workshop structure and wider RESCUE process, important results and key lessons learned

Human Activity Modelling in the Specification of Operational Requirements: Work in Progress

This paper describes our experience of integrating HCI concepts and techniques into a concurrent requirements engineering process called RESCUE. We focus on the use of a model of current human activity to inform specification of a future system. We show how human activity descriptions, written using a specially designed template, can facilitate the authoring of use case descriptions to be used in the elicitation of requirements for complex socio-technical systems. We describe our experience of using descriptions of human activity, written using the template, to support specification of operational requirements for DMAN, a system to support air traffic controllers in managing the departure of aircraft from airports. We end with a discussion of lessons learnt from our experience and present some ideas for future development of work in this area

Understanding requirements engineering process: a challenge for practice and education

Reviews of the state of the professional practice in Requirements Engineering (RE) stress that the RE process is both complex and hard to describe, and suggest there is a significant difference between competent and "approved" practice. "Approved" practice is reflected by (in all likelihood, in fact, has its genesis in) RE education, so that the knowledge and skills taught to students do not match the knowledge and skills required and applied by competent practitioners. A new understanding of the RE process has emerged from our recent study. RE is revealed as inherently creative, involving cycles of building and major reconstruction of the models developed, significantly different from the systematic and smoothly incremental process generally described in the literature. The process is better characterised as highly creative, opportunistic and insight driven. This mismatch between approved and actual practice provides a challenge to RE education - RE requires insight and creativity as well as technical knowledge. Traditional learning models applied to RE focus, however, on notation and prescribed processes acquired through repetition. We argue that traditional learning models fail to support the learning required for RE and propose both a new model based on cognitive flexibility and a framework for RE education to support this model

A framework for the elicitation and analysis of Information Technology service requirements and their alignment with enterprise business goals

As the economies of the world have become increasingly dependant on Information Technology (IT) services, there is a need for service designers and developers to focus on co-value creation between service providers and service consumers. Developers need to conduct a more rigorous and systematic identification, elicitation, and analysis of IT service requirements than ever before so that the resulting IT services are closely aligned with the enterprise business requirements. Research in Services Science from the business and management discipline has mostly focused on the delivery and management of services experience from the business perspective. Much of the research focus in Service Oriented Computing (SOC) so far has been on the design and delivery of services (especially Web Services), but engineering of IT service requirements has received much less attention. The overall aims of the proposed research is the design and development of an integrated framework and its supporting toolset for the systematic identification, elicitation, and analysis of IT service requirements that satisfy consumers' needs and are closely aligned with their enterprise business goals. © 2010 IEEE

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

Use and Influence of Creative Ideas and Requirements for a Work-Integrated Learning System

In this paper, we describe a creativity workshop that was used in a large research project, called APOSDLE, to generate creative ideas and requirements for a work-integrated learning system. We present an analysis of empirical data collected during and after the workshop. On the basis of this analysis, we conclude that the work-shop was an efficient way of generating ideas for future system development. These ideas, on average, were used at least as much as requirements from other sources in writing use cases, and 18 months after the workshop were seen to have a similar degree of influence on the project to other requirements. We make some observations about the use of more and less creative ideas, and about the techniques used to generate them. We end with suggestions for further work

Methodology for introducing creativity in requirements engineering

The increase of global competitiveness, the ability of organizations to effectively use information technologies, and to focus on innovation and creativity are recognized as being important. In this context, the hypothesis of resorting to known creativity techniques or adaptations to help innovation in the field of Software Engineering appears to be challenging. This paper proposes a methodology for introducing creativity and innovation techniques in the Requirements Engineering process in order to build more agile and efficient Information Systems. The method uses a variety of creative techniques that are thought to be appropriate to the different stages of the process and is inspired by existing creative problem-solving methods and techniques, in particular in the Creative Problem-Solving Process, Productive Thinking Model and the Creative Potentiation Method. The study of the method allowed its application, through the use of various creativity techniques, in a real context in a social institution - the Social Center for Support to the Community of S ão Domingos. The application of the methodology allowed the identification of new opportunities that allowed the organization to devise service delivery strategies that were more suited to the needs of people.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Design activity framework for visualization design

pre-printAn important aspect in visualization design is the connection between what a designer does and the decisions the designer makes. Existing design process models, however, do not explicitly link back to models for visualization design decisions. We bridge this gap by introducing the design activity framework, a process model that explicitly connects to the nested model, a well-known visualization design decision model. The framework includes four overlapping activities that characterize the design process, with each activity explicating outcomes related to the nested model. Additionally, we describe and characterize a list of exemplar methods and how they overlap among these activities. The design activity framework is the result of reflective discussions from a collaboration on a visualization redesign project, the details of which we describe to ground the framework in a real-world design process. Lastly, from this redesign project we provide several research outcomes in the domain of cybersecurity, including an extended data abstraction and rich opportunities for future visualization research