Abstract. Though more and more researchers have realized the importance of creativity in software development, there are few empirical studies reported on this topic. In this paper, we present an exploratory empirical research in which several issues on creativity in software development are studied, that is, which development phases are perceived to include more creative work, whether or not UML-based documentation can make developers perceive more time is devoted to creative work, whether or not more creative work can accelerate the software development speed, and whether developers more prefer to do the creative work. Based on result analyses, we proposed four hypotheses to direct the future research in this field and discussed the challenge that 'since developers do not like to participate in those improving activities (quality assuring activities), how can we keep and improve software quality effectively and efficiently?'

Abstract. In conversational case-based reasoning (CCBR), a main problem is how to select the most discriminative questions and display them to users in a natural way to alleviate users' cognitive load. This is referred to as the question selection task. Current question selection methods are knowledge-poor, that is, only statistical metrics are taken into account. In this paper, we identify four computational tasks of a conversation process: feature inferencing, question ranking, consistent question clustering and coherent question sequencing. We show how general domain knowledge is able to improve these processes. A knowledge representation system suitable for capturing both cases and general knowledge has been extended with meta-level relations for controlling a CCBR process. An "explanation-boosted" reasoning approach, designed to accomplish the knowledge-intensive question selection tasks, is presented. An application of our implemented system is illustrated in the car fault detection domain.

Abstract:Component retrieval, about how to locate and identify appropriate components, is one of the major problems in component reuse. It becomes more critical as more reusable components come from component markets instead of from an in-house component library, and the number of available components is dramatically increasing. In this paper, we review the current component retrieval methods and propose our conversational component retrieval model (CCRM). In CCRM, components are represented as cases, a knowledge-intensive case-based reasoning (CBR) method is adopted to explore context-based semantic similarities between users' query and stored components, and a conversational case-based reasoning (CCBR) technology is selected to acquire users' requirements interactively and incrementally.

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