CAREER: Measuring and Supporting Creativity in Developing Software Requirements

Mississippi State University, Mississippi State MS

Investigators

Abstract

New products and new companies in the software industry often compete against existing software. This makes it important for new products that better meet people's needs and that differ from existing ones. Creativity in Requirements Engineering (RE) emphasizes the key role of developing creative requirements that are both novel and appropriate for a given application. Existing approaches to promote requirements creativity, including multi-day workshops, tools, and frameworks, are time-consuming, often ineffective, and largely dependent on the requirements analyst's own creativity. Moreover, creativity has a number of facets that should be assessed independently, but the field of RE has few good tools for evaluating creativity. This project's goal is to use a range of artificial intelligence-based techniques both to help assess requirement creativity and to help software engineers develop more creative requirements. This will involve both developing interfaces that help engineers consider a wider range of possible requirements and a framework for evaluating creativity in RE. The research work will also support curriculum development, mentoring of student researchers, and creativity-focused training workshops for K-12 students, teachers, and software startups. The success of this project will advance fundamental knowledge in creative software development and impact local, state, and national economies by helping developers become creative software professionals and increasing the chance that products and companies succeed. The project focuses on two main objectives. The first main objective is to use data mining, machine learning, and natural language processing techniques to generate potentially creative ideas based on existing online software-related content such as reviews, product descriptions, issue tracking systems, and forum discussions. These techniques will then be integrated into a support system to explore and select creative requirements with guided human intervention. The second main objective is to develop a comprehensive framework for evaluating the creativity of software requirements, based on well-established dimensions of creativity that include relevance and effectiveness, novelty, elegance, and genesis. These tools and scales will be validated through user studies including professional software developers and experts in RE. Providing an automated mechanism to support the discovery of creative requirements and a novel framework to evaluate the creativity of requirements, this project addresses the fundamental issues that act as barriers to the wide adoption of creativity in software requirements engineering. This project is jointly funded by Human Centered Computing (HCC), the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), and Software & Hardware Foundations (SHF). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.