=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1674/iStar16_pp25-30
|storemode=property
|title=Creative Leaf: A Creative iStar Modeling Tool
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1674/iStar16_pp25-30.pdf
|volume=Vol-1674
|authors=Jennifer Horkoff,Neil Maiden
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/istar/HorkoffM16
}}
==Creative Leaf: A Creative iStar Modeling Tool==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1674/iStar16_pp25-30.pdf
Creative Leaf: A Creative iStar Modeling Tool
Jennifer Horkoff, Neil Maiden
Center for Creativity in Professional Practice, City University London, UK
horkoff,n.a.m.maiden@city.ac.uk
Abstract. iStar models allow users to capture high-level social requirements, in-
cluding alternatives and qualities. Typical approaches advocate discovering model
content through traditional Requirements Engineering (RE) elicitation methods,
such as interviews, observations, and domain documents. For the typical, familiar
space of requirements, such techniques may be sufficient, but stakeholders may
not always know the best way to meet their needs, and may have difficultly articu-
lating their goals. Creativity theories and activities have been successfully applied
to RE in order to discover both creative and more typical requirements. In this
work we describe the web-based Creative Leaf tool that facilitates a combination
of established creativity techniques with iStar modeling. Divergent techniques
help the discovery of ideas, while selection, evaluation and modeling techniques
help to converge over ideas, integrating them into the model and system design.
Keywords: creativity, istar, goal modeling, method, tool support
1 Introduction
Goal models, such as iStar, provide a concrete graphical way to help ensure that po-
tential system requirements meet user goals and qualities. But where do potential re-
quirements come from? How do we find the goals and desired qualities of systems
stakeholders? Traditional Requirements Engineering (RE) approaches advocate for var-
ious forms of elicitation (interviews, observations, domain documents). For the typical,
familiar space of requirements, such techniques may be sufficient. But users and stake-
holders may not always know the best way to solve their problems, to meet their needs,
or even to identify what those needs may be. Stakeholders are biased by their own ex-
periences, and are often too-grounded in the use of existing tools [10]. Goals, although
helpful in grounding function to purpose, are often difficult for stakeholders to articu-
late [16]. There is a need for methods to expand the space of known requirements, to
consider and evaluate possibilities beyond the typical space of functions and intentions.
Such divergent thinking is critical to support the development of creative requirements,
leading to innovative systems which create competitive advantages.
The role of creativity theories and techniques has been investigated and applied in
an RE-context for more than ten years, e.g., [10,11,2,12,9]. The research outputs of
such efforts include the design of structured creativity workshops, RE-focused creativ-
ity techniques, and a series of guidelines for applying creativity in practice. Workshops
use a series of creativity activities (e.g., brainstorming, role playing, and BrightSparks).
These are structured activities which attempt to guide participants through activities or
steps which may produce new ideas. Although creative requirements workshops have
Copyright © 2016 for this paper by its authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes.
Proceedings of the Ninth International i* Workshop (iStar 2016), CEUR Vol-1674
seen success when applied to real contexts such as Air Traffic Control and Food Safety,
workshops are expensive to run, require highly-skilled facilitators, and produce output
which is often fragmented and only lightly structured (ideas, scenarios, use cases) [11].
RE-focused creativity techniques (such as [2,12]), can be useful, but the power of cre-
ativity is better harnessed by use of successive and varied techniques, in order to expand
the search space in differing ways. Existing work has also begun to explore the syner-
gies between creativity and goal modeling from the perspective of transformational
creativity, but without yet providing a more general tool [15].
In order to address many of these drawbacks in both goal modeling and creativity
approaches as used in RE, our work has combined the two approaches, producing a
concrete tool and guiding methodology: Creative Leaf 1 . Our overall intention is to
facilitate the structured capture of creative requirements – those requirements which are
not obvious, typical, or which do not immediately come to the mind of the stakeholders.
Creative Leaf is an output of a design research process involving a series of forma-
tive and summative studies conducted over the last 1.5 years. We leave the reporting
of these studies to further work, and in this short paper focus on describing the result-
ing tool. We have previously published initial visions of how the tool and method may
work, using historical examples [5,7,6]. In this paper, we describe the concrete output of
the design process, including embedded exploratory creativity activities, and activities
designed to help users evaluate, prioritize and model their ideas.
Section 2 describes the design and functionality of the tool. Section 3 concludes the
paper and makes a call for participation in the use and evaluation of Creative Leaf.
2 Creative Leaf
A screenshot of Creative Leaf is shown in 1. The left hand panel contains a palette with
iStar elements. The included elements and links were based on an early version of the
iStar 2.0 core [4]. We have plans to update the palette to conform to the latest version
of the iStar core. To support high-level creative thought, the tool allows user to draw
ideas and assumptions along with the typical iStar elements. These new elements can
be connected to other elements with the typical iStar links, in other words, they are first-
class modeling elements. The middle of the tool contains the canvas, where the model
can be drawn, and the creative ideas placed. The right hand side contains the creativity
panel. Each of the gray boxes are clickable, opening a window guiding users through a
particular creative activity. The right and left panels are collapsible, allowing modelers
to focus on the center canvas when needed, particularly when using smaller screens.
2.1 Implementation Details
The iStar modeling capability of Creative Leaf is based off the Leaf Beta tool developed
at the University of Toronto by Alicia Grubb et al.2 . The Leaf code has been modified
and adapted, e.g., to add ideas and assumptions. (Creative) Leaf uses both the Join-
tJS and Rappid3 HTML 5 diagramming frameworks. JointJS is available via an open
1
http://creativeleaf.city.ac.uk/
2
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/˜amgrubb/leaf
3
http://www.jointjs.com/
26
Creative Leaf: A Creative iStar Modeling Tool
Fig. 1: Screenshot of Creative Leaf Tool
license, while Rappid is a commercial product, but provides free academic licenses.
Code is written in JavasScript, using CSS and HTML files for formatting and display.
Creative Leaf code is stored on a private GitHub repository, forked from the Leaf code
base. Access can be made available to other institutions which acquire a license for
Rappid (all other sections of code apart from the Rappid libraries are Open Source and
are available on request).
In addition to modeling and creative functions, the tool has an embedded tracking
function which tracks user actions with time stamps. Users have the option to turn off or
on this tracking at first use, and later via the Options menu. Creative Leaf uses a series
of unobtrusive prompts to guide users to the next likely activity, particularly when the
user is inactive for some period of time. These prompts can also be disabled via Options.
2.2 Exploratory Creativity
The Creativity panel on the right of the tool allows users to work through a number of
established creativity activities. Following the model of the Creative Problem Solving
(CPS) method, creative activities are aimed to support either divergent creativity, gen-
erating ideas, or convergent creativity, selecting, combining and developing ideas [13].
The first five activities within Creative Leaf support exploratory creativity, while the
last two begin to support convergence.
Exploratory creativity activities in Creative Leaf include Brainstorming, CRUISE
creative search, Pairwise Comparison, Creativity Triggers, and Bright Sparks (Hall of
Fame). More information about the general form of these activities can be found within
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Proceedings of the Ninth International i* Workshop (iStar 2016), CEUR Vol-1674
Fig. 2: Screenshot of CRUISE Exploratory Activity within Creative Leaf Tool
the BeCreative Creativity Support tool [1]. Each activity (apart from Brainstorming)
takes as input some piece of the iStar model. Ideas can be recorded in the tool by typing
in the text field on the bottom part of the activity window. When the users are done an
activity (they’ve run out of ideas), they can “Add ideas to the Model Canvas and exit”
where each idea appears as a yellow idea “post-it” on the model. Such idea elements
can be moved around and attached to other model elements via the typical iStar links,
e.g., this idea helps this Softgoal/Quality. We describe each Creativity Activity in more
detail in the following.
Brainstorming is the very general activity encouraging people to capture all the “ob-
vious” ideas, which they already have in mind. Studies showed that without this initial
activity, users ignored the structure and prompts of further activities and only listed the
ideas they already had. The CRUISE activity calls an external creativity service, a result
of the Collage Project 4 . The input search string is a selected iStar element, actor or idea.
The CRUISE service returns a cloud of images, links and text which are tangentially
related to the search string. Ideas prompted by the output are captured at the bottom of
the window. An example screenshot of the CRUISE activity can be seen in Fig. 2.
The Pairwise Comparison activity, inspired by Poincare’s emphasis on creativity
through connections [14], displays pairs of iStar elements from the model, avoiding
elements directly connected. Users can iterate through pairs until they find one or more
which inspires ideas. The Creativity Trigger activity compares available triggers with a
selected iStar element, using the text and image trigger cards developed by Robertson
& Robertson, and explored empirically in a recent paper [3]. Users can iterate through
triggers (Connections, Convenience, Information and Choices, Participation, Service,
and Trust) until they find one or more which inspires ideas. BrightSparks, like CRUISE,
4
http://cruise.imuresearch.eu/ui/explore
28
Creative Leaf: A Creative iStar Modeling Tool
makes a call to an external service 5 . This activity takes an actor as input and asks the
user to think of the actor being played by a famous persona (e.g., Batman, Joan of Arc,
Henry Ford), allowing the user to iterate through personas.
2.3 Analysis, Selection & Modeling
Once ideas have been discovered, the user needs help selecting amongst ideas and de-
veloping the selected ideas by integrating them into the iStar model. We offer a selection
activity which guides users through the process, see the text in Fig. 3a. Part of the se-
lection activity introduces the Hover Evaluation feature included in Creative Leaf. This
feature is based on qualitative evaluation from the first author’s previous work [8], but
is fully automated for simplicity. When the user hovers over an element, it is treated as
satisfied and the effects of that satisfaction are propagated up the model, see Fig. 3b for
an example. In this way, users can explore the effects of their ideas on the model. Ideas
can be marked by the user as Must-Have (green), Nice-to-Have (yellow) or Rejected
(removed from canvas).
The final activity encourages users to model their best ideas in iStar, manually con-
verting their idea to a number of iStar elements and links, connecting them to the ex-
isting model. This step is currently fully manual, but we are looking into providing
users with suggested mappings of their ideas into iStar elements. Once an idea has
been modeled, it is marked as modeled and removed (automatically) from the can-
vas. All ideas, including rejected and modeled ideas can be found via the idea list,
accessible via a button on the top right of the tool. More information, including tu-
torial videos and a user guide can be found in the following support site: https:
//sites.google.com/site/creativitygm4re.
5
http://brightsparks.city.ac.uk/
(b) Hover Evaluate Feature: Evaluating Idea
“Sell adds for shipping”
(a) Selection Activity Instructions
Fig. 3: Creative Leaf Details
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Proceedings of the Ninth International i* Workshop (iStar 2016), CEUR Vol-1674
3 Conclusions and Call for Input
We have introduced the reader to the Creative Leaf tool, combining goal modeling with estab-
lished creativity techniques. We encourage users to try out the tool, and provide feedback to the
authors at creativeleaf@city.ac.uk. After extensive in-lab evaluation of the tool, we are
looking for organizations with real problems willing to try out the tool and provide feedback. We
hope to use this realistic evaluation to improve the functionality and general applicability of the
tool.
Acknowledgments. This research is supported by an ERC Marie Skodowska-Curie Intra Eu-
ropean Fellow-ship (PIEF-GA-2013-627489) and a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research
Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship (Sept. 2014 - Aug. 2016).
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