The Human Factor in Software Engineering

CreaRE 2017: Sixth International Workshop on Creativity in Requirements Engineering

The most important event in February for me was the REFSQ conference which I have attended each year since 2005 and usually, I have been also a co-organizer. This year, my contribution was the organization of the CreaRE workshop for the 6th time. It took place on Monday 27th February in Essen. The agenda included three presentations and one interactive session.

• Luisa Mich, Victoria Sakhnini and Daniel Berry: Downsizing EPMcreate to Lighter Creativity Techniques for Requirements Elicitation. EPMCreate is a creativity technique for systematically eliciting requirements by changing the analyst's perspective. The method includes 16 steps in its original form. To execute them takes its time. Therefore, this presentation discussed (1) the question how to develop one-step, two-step etc. methods based on these 16 steps and (2) which of these reduced methods correspond to existing creativity techniques. Finally, the steps must be combined in a way to cover all perspectives.
• Eduard C. Groen, Matthias Koch and Andreas Maier: Vicus – A Persona for Towns: The authors work on eliciting requirements for the domain of Smart Towns. Here, the conditions differ from those in other IT projects. Neither individual stakeholders nor groups are to be considered, but whole towns or villages as a community. Therefore, the authors use personas for characterizing a town. For doing so, they use an adapted persona template.
• Nils Kubischok: Imagining the future: A social science approach to the importance of visions in the software development process. The social sciences know the strong effect of visions on expectations and actions. In Requirements Engineering, this effect so far is only vaguely discussed. This state-of-the-art article provides an overview on visions in Requirements Engineering and gives a justification of the importance of visions in RE.
• Kristian Beckers, Veronika Fries, Eduard C. Groen and Sebastian Pape: Creativity Techniques for Social Engineering Threat Elicitation: A Controlled Experiment (interactive session): For this experiment, three groups were formed. Each group followed the objective to identify social engineering threats which could be dangerous for the conference. Two groups played card games, the serious game; the other group used brainstorming to gather lists of victims, assets, channels, psychological principles, attacks, and attackers and combined them using the technique Morphological Forced Connections to form specific attack scenarios.

I participated in the second group. As for each category, we found about 10 results, I calculated that theoretically, we could form up to one million scenarios based on these. This created a bit a frustrating feeling: "What to start with?" Finally, however, I think that we found basically every relevant threat.

The card-game groups enjoyed the fun of playing and of being mean. They found the cards helpful, especially as non-experts who had not thought about social engineering before. The cards helped them to get a clear idea about the topic.

The three groups' results will be compared to each other scientifically. I am looking forwards to learn about the findings!

The presentation slides can be downloaded from the workshop website at the menu point "Workshop Program" and the workshop proceedings are online here.
There, you also find the other workshops' proceedings.