The Human Factor in Software Engineering

CreaRE 2015: Fifth International Workshop on Creativity in Requirements Engineering
https://sites.google.com/site/creare2015/
The workshop proceedings are available at:
http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1342/

This Monday, March 23, CreaRE 2015 took place in Essen (Germany). Here, I give a short summary and experience report of the workshop:

• In his key note talk with the title "Creativity is not a talent, it is a way of operating!", Kim Lauenroth (adesso) started with general concepts of creativity and then discussed how much creativity there is in RE and whether the requirements engineer must be or is allowed to be creative. One could also take the position that the requirements engineer is only the "voice recorder" for the customer's voice. Only the customer is allowed to be creative, the requirements engineer simply puts the customers' ideas on paper. In any case: RE is the most creative activity in the whole software engineering process! Requirements build the bridge between problem and solution.
• Sebastian Adam and Marcus Trapp (Fraunhofer Instituts IESE) presented "Success Factors for Creativity Workshops in RE", looking back on 9 workshops they performed in industry settings for RE. The main message they repeat is that creativity workshops must be prepared and executed systematically. The creativity and flexibility is in the content, not in the process! To identify really innovative requirements, they say, mere brainstorming is not sufficient. Some of their success factors are: a set of creativity techniques which the moderators know very well, several roles (among them two moderators) for different tasks, two full days and continuous filtering and prioritization to keep the focus. What I liked to hear especially was that starting with negative ideas ("What must not happen?") is recommended, because this is the basic idea of MOQARE and my MOQARE experience shows this, too. People love catastrophies and horror stories. They make them creative!
• Jennifer Horkoff and Neil Maiden (City University London) under the title "Creativity and Conceptual Modeling for Requirements Engineering" present a new idea how to support the creative process with an online tool, which can maybe replace a professional workshop moderator. The approach is still in the conceptual phase, but I am looking forwards to the resulting tool and process. I, too, believe that creativity needs process support.
• In our interactive session, we distributed the roundabout 20 participants into 3 groups which each applied another creativity method to the same question: How can we improve an existing RE tool? Finally, these groups solved the following three tasks:
1. Using the morphological box, creative new ideas of tool support for RE were developed, in various unexpected combinations of features an RE tool already has.
2. Applying the Force Fit method which brings together what does not belong to each other, combined Facebook with requirements traceability. In fact, they found lots of similarities and applications, like defining friend relations between requirements and prioritizing requirements by liking them.
3. The 6 Thinking Hats group analysed Visio as an RE tool, and although emotions went in the direction of "I hate it", they identified many advantages of the tool, too. Comparing it with alternative tools, enhancement ideas arose and in the end there were two requirements which were thought worthwhile to be treated further in a subsequent RE workshop, one of them the online collaboration which so far is not supported by this tool.