Live from REFSQ'09: Inventing Requirements with Creativity Support Tools

This paper was presented by Kristine Karlsen of City University London, UK. She started with the statement that requirements elicitation should be a creative process. The stakeholders know their problems, but they don’t necessarily know all of the possibilities to solve those problems. Her research presented here is based on the idea there is a lack of tools to support this creative elicitation process.

In her study, she used existing techniques: web-based scenario walkthroughs and storyboarding first (using their scenario tool, ART-SCENE). Then she used a combinatorial tool that relied on inputting scenario phrases into a search tool that then searching the web for images and text. The person literally sits and watches pictures go by, waiting for some new idea for a requirement to be triggered for their scenario.

The new requirements were then evaluated by SMEs so to their novelty and usefulness. She found that this process certainly doesn’t work for all types of analysts in that some people didn’t use it as well. They actually generated fewer requirements using this process than not (though arguably they had already generated the obvious ones so I’m not sure the point of this result) but they suspect that they did generate more novel requirements. This last point was certainly a point of question. She doesn’t believe they have enough results to say it’s conclusive yet but some of the participants in the conference asked questions about who defines what “novel” is.

Whether or not this particular idea is right is less relevant to me. Her original assumption though is very relevant that what we do is a creative process. I think it is what differentiates a true product management from someone who just elicits requirements. In the absence of a tool, there are various materials out there on how to put people in a creative mindset and do activities that inspire innovation (for example: Luke Hohmann’s Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play)

Live from RE'08: Creativity Workshops

Neil Maiden presented a paper Use and Influence of Creative Ideas and Requirements for a Work-Integrated Learning System by Sara Jones, Perry Lunch, himself from the University of Manchester and Stefanie Lindstaedt from the Know-Center.

The basic premise behind their paper is that there is an issue with elicitation, in that it assumes that the users know and can articulate what they want. They’ve integrated creativity workshop techniques to address this.

In short summary, they ran a two-day creativity workshop with 16 stakeholders, 1 facilitator, and 2 scribes. Through the workshop they do divergence and convergence of ideas, repeated several times over. I believe the idea is that people come into the workshop with some narrow ideas, so you broaden those ideas. Then in time you converge them back down to something more specific and useful. Some of the techniques they used include:

• Round robin brainstorming, using creativity triggers
• Constraint removal – a systematic technique to remove constraints, even if it is not feasible to remove them for real, but pretending they aren’t there allows for more creativity
• Solution presentation – use technology ideas they already do have to inspire new ideas

They did quite a bit of data analysis and at least can show some tentative amount of “creative ideas” came out of these workshops. Either way, I do think this is important. It reminds me of the work by Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play by Luke Hohmann, which we’ve had some success with.