Using an Ideas Creation System to Assist and Inspire Creativity in Requirements Engineering

Abstract

APRES 2015 was the second edition of the Asia-Pacific Requirements Engineering Symposium (APRES 2015) that serves as a highly interactive forum for in-depth discussion of all issues related to requirements engineering following the success of APRES 2014 in New Zealand. The symposium took place on the beautiful campus of Wuhan University, in the historical city of Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province, central China, with the Yangzi River running across the city landscape. Requirements engineering (RE) as an established discipline of research and practice in software and systems development has established an RE community worldwide. The importance of developing and following effective RE practices has long been recognized by researchers and practitioners alike, especially when facing the latest advancements in socio-technological needs in various industrial sectors, such as e-commerce, manufacturing, health care, etc. This year, the discussions concentrated on "RE in the Big Data Era". According to the growing interest in RE research and practice, the APRES symposium series aims to develop and expand the RE research and practice community specifically in the Asia-Pacific region and to foster collaborations among local researchers and practitioners in Asia and Oceania. This year the symposium received 18 submissions from active researchers from all over the world, among which nine full papers, one short paper, and three tool demos were accepted. All papers were carefully reviewed by at least three Program Committee members, and detailed constructive feedback was provided to the authors. We had participants and presentations from Asia, Oceania, Europe, and North America on both traditional RE topics, such as requirements acquisition, modeling and analysis, as well as new topics such as crowdsourcing, extreme RE, and creativity. APRES 2015 had a focused program including two keynote speeches covering RE research and big data challenges. There were four paper presentation sessions, including RE tool demos and case studies. A plenary panel was arranged at the end of the conference to discuss future steps for RE improvement. APRES 2015 also hosted a dedicated industrial RE Day, which attracted a very good number of participants and enriched the overall offering of the conference venues for the discussion of problems and sharing of good practices in RE, especially so as to foster RE research-industrial collaborations in the Asia-Pacific region. Our greatest thanks go to the authors and presenters, whose contributions made APRES 2015 a success. We are grateful to the Program Committee members for their thorough and timely reviews on the submissions. We thank the Steering Committee for their valuable guidance. We would like to thank Yong Xia for organizing and managing the industrial track for APRES 2015. We thank the sponsors of APRES 2015, Wuhan University and International Requirements Engineering Board (IREB). Our thanks also go to Springer, the publisher of the APRES proceedings, for the

Flourishing creativity in software development via Internetware paradigm

“…Although the dimensions and sub-dimensions cannot be directly employed in this research, the method used in these studies is worth learning. In particular, some elements are proposed for the creativity of ideas creation [12]. In this paper, the proposed creativity elements are adopted for its own purpose.…”

“…Boden [13] suggests an idea can be considered as new and creative only if it contains three kernel features, which are novelty, applicable, and surprising. Specially, it points out that a new idea should be imaginative [12]. Therefore, by adopting some of the method from Dean's studies, Novelty, Usefulness and Surprising forms the creativity metrics for this research.…”

“…The creativity metrics depicted in Section 4 are adopted to support requirements engineering. Particularly, they are adopted for elicitation and presentation [12]. Figure 8 shows how the creativity metrics work for requirements engineering as creativity elements.…”