The Tenth Anniversary of the CreaRE Workshops: A Look Back and a Look Forward

Abstract

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of CreaRE, this paper explains why creativity is essential in requirements engineering (RE). However, not everyone is able to be as creative as needed. So, the research in creativity in RE has focused on ways to help people and groups be more creative in generating requirement ideas. The role of CreaRE has been and must continue to be to allow showcasing proposals and early results in this research. To fulfill this role, CreaRE has published mainly papers about specific techniques to enhance creativity in and for RE and about empirical studies of specific techniques, of comparisons between multiple techniques, and of industrial attempts to be creative in RE. It has also encouraged discussions about creativity in RE through some of its papers; some workshops, panels, and discussions; and some keynotes.

Introduction

Copyright c 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

Brief Overview of Creativity in RE

It was observed very early by Couger, Gause, Gizikis, Glass, Maiden, McBreen, the Robertsons, Weinberg and others [ 21, 22, 23, 10, 34, 30, 46, 47, 32, 33 ] that creativity, the ability to think of new and useful ideas, is essential in RE. Basically, without creativity in RE, there would be no innovation in software development; all new software would implement the same old functionality. It is worth noting that RE [ 21 ] has all the characteristics of tough problems [38] that call for creativity, in particular when groups of stakeholders are involved. Therefore, it helps that all stakeholders, including customers and end users, are creative about system functionality, and not just the requirements engineers. Finally, creativity gives the hope of attacking what some consider to be the most difficult problem in RE, that of discovering missing requirements, especially tacit requirements and those arising from unknown unknowns [ 22, 57, 1, 59, 19 ].

Some argue that every human being is creative, even saying that creativity is what distinguishes human beings from other animals [ 15, 35 ]. However, it is clear that some are more creative than others [ 5 ], and thus, some are less creative than others. Nevertheless, many believe that creativity is a learnable skill [60]. Indeed, the assumption underneath the drive to develop creativity enhancement techniques (CETs), such as those listed below, is that creativity can be guided through more or less formalized methods [ 24 ].

So, the research in creativity in RE has been, and must continue to be, to find ways to help people be more creative about generating creative ideas about functionality and other requirements for the systems they need to build. This work has included and is not limited to finding new and more effective creativity enhancement techniques (CETs), such as Brainstorming [42], Creative Analysis [45], Six Thinking Hats [ 12 ], Creative Problem Solving [43], Creative Pause Technique [ 13 ], Creativity Software [ 28 ], and EPMcreate [37]; improving or optimizing existing CETs such as with Structured Brainstorming [ 9 ], Solo Brainstorming [ 4 ], and POEPMcreate [49, 50]; finding RE methods that allow or even encourage creativity in individuals or groups, such as managed group creativity [58], User-Centered System Design [41], brainstormed collective decision-making [56], Collaborative Requirements Engineering [ 3 ], Joint Application Design or Joint Application Development (JAD) [ 61, 11 ], and creativity workshops [ 31, 52 ]; foundational research about what makes people and groups of people creative, more creative, and less creative [ 44, 55, 18, 17, 53, 2, 54, 7, 14, 16, 51, 20, 48, 60, 29, 5 ]; and the effects of domain knowledge, or the lack thereof, on creativity [ 6, 27, 36, 40 ].

Note that if in a fit of creativity, some new category of work outside the traditional creativity-in-RE box is discovered, it should, of course, be added to this list!

When any of this work leads to proposals for an actionable way to improve the creativity of RE, by making individuals or groups doing RE more able to generate useful and innovative requirement ideas, the effectiveness of the way must be validated empirically in the context of RE processes [ 39, 8, 37, 62, 49, 50, 25 ]. This empirical validation requires evaluating the creativity of generated ideas. The basis for evaluating the creativity of an idea is the notion that a creative idea is both new and useful [ 26 ]. 3

The Role of CreaRE Workshops

I see the role of the CreaRE workshops as being that of fostering this research by providing a forum in which

1. just proposals and early results can be showcased and discussed, and

2. foundational ideas, and what works and what does not, can be discussed.

This work is far enough outside of the RE box, that occasionally, an early paper about a new idea in creativity in RE has been rejected from conferences and journals as being out of scope. For example, an early version of one empirical study of ways to use EPMcreate [50] was permanently rejected from one important RE venue because of one strongly negative review that included the comment - The term “inventing” requirements is essentially flawed. Requirements are not invented. They are discovered or elicitated [sic]. Sadly and ironically, some work on creativity in RE is too creative for the taste of the RE field. Thus, another function of CreaRE is to help educate the RE field about the importance of creativity in RE. Just repeatedly staging this workshop and being visible helps in this endeavor. 4

Brief Assessment of the Impact of CreaRE Publications

Conclusion

The eight incarnations of the CreaRE workshop have reliably provided a venue for presenting early versions of research on improving creativity in RE, in particular for presenting descriptions of and empirical evaluations of various CETs geared to generating requirement ideas. Even though there is no evidence that the workshop has had any industrial impact, the papers, keynotes, panels, and discussions have helped researchers move in fruitful directions, and in some cases to move papers to fully refereed conferences and journals. Therefore, my view is that the CreaRE workshop has done a decent job of fulfilling its roles in its first 10 years, and it must continue to do so in the coming years. I thank the reviewers, Eduard Groen, and Andrea Herrmann for their constructive comments on the submitted and later versions of this paper. My work was supported in part by a Canadian NSERC Discovery Grant, NSERC-RGPIN227055-15. [32] N. Maiden, S. Robertson, and A. Gizikis. Provoking creativity: Imagine what your requirements could be like. IEEE Software, 21(5):68–75, 2004. [33] N. Maiden, S. Robertson, and J. Robertson. Creative requirements: Invention and its role in requirements engineering. In

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