On the Way to a Framework for Evaluating Creativity in Requirements Engineering

Creativity in requirements engineering (RE) has recently emerged to help innovate “novel and useful” requirements and improve a software system’s sustainability. Existing research has mostly focused on workshops, techniques, and tools to aid creative requirements elicitation. Limited attention, however, has been dedicated to creativity evaluation, despite the current mechanisms being largely restricted to rating requirements for a broad notion of “novelty and appropriateness”. In addition, such mechanisms focus on evaluating creativity from an elicitation perspective, leaving other RE activities widely disregarded. To further advance the literature, we present a preliminary study on developing a framework that aims to evaluate creativity in a precise manner and accounts for the full spectrum of RE activities. In particular, we propose a “creative requirement diagnosis scale (CRDS)” that includes 27 indicators to assess creativity, present a novel framework to evaluate the creative merits of requirements in terms of the complete RE process, and further evaluate requirements using our framework in a study with 53 participants. The results suggest our framework’s potential to capture creativity aspects that would otherwise be undetected by traditional techniques. Our study also indicates the need for further refinement of the framework, thereby opening new avenues for creativity in RE.