Collaborative creativity in requirements engineering: Analysis and practical advice

Abstract

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.

Leveraging topic modeling and part-of-speech tagging to support combinational creativity in requirements engineering

“…Clustering the requirements and comments directly (e.g., [63]), instead of the social network, could be an alternative. We believe, however, considering the social network better reflects the collaborative nature of RE [30] and better supports the definition of combinational creativity [12].…”

“…Lately, the collaborative nature of creativity in RE has been highlighted by Mahaux et al [30]. Their research shows that people often need to work collaboratively to be creative and provides a framework characterizing the collaborative creative process in RE.…”

Stakeholders' social interaction in requirements engineering of open source software

“…Clustering the requirements and comments directly (e.g., [140]), instead of the social network, could be an alternative. We believe, however, considering the social network better reflects the collaborative nature of RE [116].…”

“…Lately, the collaborative nature of creativity in RE has been highlighted by Mahaux and colleagues [116]. Their research shows that people often need to work collaboratively to be creative and provides a framework characterizing the collaborative creative process in RE.…”

Geographically Distributed Sensemaking: Developing Understanding in Forum-Based Software Development Teams

“…In a team situation, the sensemaking process is further complicated; team members have to share information and opinions, and deliberate to achieve consensus. Software design activities, from problem understanding through requirements formulation to solution synthesis are quintessentially sensemaking [22]- [25].…”