SPA2005 session: Creativity, the Path to Innovative Requirements | |||
| One-line description: | How to introduce creative thinking techniques during structured requirements processes | ||
| Session format: | Tutorial [read about the different session types] | ||
| Abstract: | Where do requirements come from? The optimistic view is that the customers or users of a system tell the requirements engineer what they want. For a variety of reasons, this is rarely the case. People don’t know exactly what they want, they do not know what is possible, or they cannot express their real needs, or because they think in terms of current solutions or they cannot envisage the future. Requirements engineering is increasingly a creative process in which stakeholders and designers work together to create ideas for new systems that are eventually expressed as requirements. This half-day tutorial illustrates how we use innovative techniques to imagine, create, discover and formalise requirements. We also illustrate how creativity can be used in requirements engineering and provide a guide for running creative design workshops. This is an interactive hands-on tutorial based on experience in running creativity workshops for air traffic management systems in the UK, France and Belgium, as well as for other application domains in the UK. The tutorial will demonstrate how to integrate these techniques with structured processes, and in particular use cases, to enable the results of creative thinking directly into artefacts that can be used to specify and design software-based systems. An outline of the workshop will be: 1. What is creativity and why do we want it? 2. Creativity workshops - a potted history and lessons learned 3. A simple case study 4. Applying creativity techniques - constraint removal, analogical reasoning, combinatorial thinking through storyboards 5. Maintaining a pool of experts 6. Integrating your creative ideas into use case and other models 7. Planning and designing a creativity workshop | ||
| Audience background: | Participants should have a background and experience of the early phases of systems development - acquiring and discovering requirements, describing and specifying requirements and use cases, participating in JAD and brainstorming workshops. This is to ensure that they have a baseline understanding of the current problems and limitations in current requirements practices. | ||
| Benefits of participating: | Participants will receive the following benefits: - Exposure to state-of-the-art thinking and practice in creative thinking and RE; - Case histories of previous successes and failures with creativity workshops; - Practice with creativity techniques that we apply in creativity techniques; - Feedback of the effectiveness of these techniques from leading experts; - Guidelines and advice on running their own creativity workshops. | ||
| Materials provided: | Tutorial and lecture material in PPT form Tutorial exercises Various creativity props Papers describing the workshops and their effectiveness as lessons learned | ||
| Process: | The tutorial will mix talking heads from the 2 presenters with group tutorial and feedback exercises. The timetable will be: 00.00-00.20 What is creativity and why do we want it? 00.20-00.50 Creativity workshops - a potted history and lessons learned 00.50-01.00 A simple case study 01.00-01.45 Applying creativity techniques - constraint removal, analogical reasoning, combinatorial thinking through storyboards 01.45-02.00 Feedback and thoughts on the creativity techniques 02.00-02.10 Maintaining a pool of experts 02.10-02.20 Integrating your creative ideas into use case and other models 02.20-02.30 Planning and designing a creativity workshop | ||
| Outputs: | Outputs will be notes provided and slides provided to the participants, and supporting academic papers as needed. | ||
| History: | An earlier version of the tutorial was presented to 25 participants at RE\'02 conference. A revised version was presented to 30 people in October 2003 to a meeting of the BCS RESG. A new version of the tutorial is being presented at the RE\'04 conference. | ||
| Presenters | |||
| 1. Neil Maiden City University |
2. Suzanne Robertson | 3. | |