ICT4S 2029: What Will Be The Systems Supporting Sustainability in 15 Years

Research is often inspired by visions of the future. These visions can take on various narrative forms, and can fall anywhere along the spectrum from utopian to dystopian. Even though we recognize the importance of such visions to help us shape research questions and inspire rich design spaces to be explored, the opportunity to discuss them is rarely given in a research context. Imagine how civilization will have changed in 15 years. What is your vision for systems that will be supporting sustainability in that time Which transformational changes will have occurred in the mean time that allow for these systems Is ICT even the right tool or does it contradict sustainability by making our world ever more complex How can we make systems and our societies more sustainable and resilient by ICT4S This paper presents a compilation of fictional abstracts for inspiration and discussion, and provides means to stimulate discussion on future research and contributes to ICT4S community building

Towards an ontology of requirements engineering approaches

Requirements are a key factor in determining the success or failure of the system development process. Requirements engineering is a creative problem-solving process whose primary purpose is to enable researchers and practitioners to apply appropriate theories, models, techniques and tools to understand and support the requirements processes more effectively. However, there is a multitude of ways to conduct the requirements engineering process and the quality of the requirements can be greatly influenced by the approaches employed. While consensus exists that no one approach works in all situations, how do practitioners and researchers select the most relevant and appropriate approach(es)? In order to understand this, we argue that a community-based effort is required to organise the plethora of requirements engineering approaches into an ontology. Such a structure would provide an opportunity to identify gaps and to improve the interfaces between approaches. Crowdsourcing the development and validation of such an ontology would facilitate its application across different system types and application domains

Choose your Creativity: Why and How Creativity in Requirements Engineering Means Different Things to Different People

International audience[Context and Motivation] The word “creativity” is used widely in business and academia, but its meaning may differ greatly depending on context. This may cause confusion in the minds of requirements engineers who have to determine which kinds of creativity are relevant to their project and which creativity tools to use. [Question/Problem] The main goal of this work is to understand why and how the meaning of the word “creativity” varies, and study the impacts of these variations on requirements engineering. [Principal ideas / results]. A comparative review of creativity-related literature from Social Sciences and Requirements Engineering was performed. [Contributions] This study results in a new framework for understanding the precise local meaning of creativity used in a specific context, before deciding on the adequate support for it. Since creativity in RE is still a relatively new topic, research directions are also proposed

Choose your Creativity: Why and How Creativity in Requirements Engineering Means Different Things to Different People

International audience[Context and Motivation] The word “creativity” is used widely in business and academia, but its meaning may differ greatly depending on context. This may cause confusion in the minds of requirements engineers who have to determine which kinds of creativity are relevant to their project and which creativity tools to use. [Question/Problem] The main goal of this work is to understand why and how the meaning of the word “creativity” varies, and study the impacts of these variations on requirements engineering. [Principal ideas / results]. A comparative review of creativity-related literature from Social Sciences and Requirements Engineering was performed. [Contributions] This study results in a new framework for understanding the precise local meaning of creativity used in a specific context, before deciding on the adequate support for it. Since creativity in RE is still a relatively new topic, research directions are also proposed

Collaborative creativity in requirements engineering: analysis and practical advice

Requirements engineering (RE) often entails interdisciplinary groups of people working together to find novel and valuable solutions to a complex design problem. In such situations RE requires creativity in a form where interactions among stakeholders are particularly important: collaborative creativity. However, few studies have explicitly concentrated on understanding collaborative creativity in RE, resulting in limited advice for practitioners on how to support this aspect of RE. This paper provides a framework of factors characterising collaborative creative processes in RE. These factors enable a systematic investigation of the collaboratively creative nature of RE. They can potentially guide practitioners when facilitating RE efforts, and also provide researchers with ideas on where to focus when developing methods and tools for RE. © 2013 IEEE