Abstract Creative thinking is desirable in many professions. This article reports new research that followed a design science approach to develop and investigate a co‐creative tool called Sport Sparks in one profession – the coaching of professional football players. In response to a coach entering a text description of a coaching challenge (e.g., struggling to maintain the fitness of an athlete) into the tool, the tool automatically generated potentially novel ideas (e.g., reducing game time and changing their nutrition) that the coach could select and/or adapt and evolve into a simple action plan (e.g., which links nutrition to increased game time). This Sport Sparks tool was designed to be an example of human‐centred artificial intelligence that aspires to empower humans, to deliver high levels of human control as well as automation, and empower people rather than emulate their expertise. It was engineered with rule‐based reasoning to automate the generation of potential new ideas that coaches could select and refine during interactions which provide high user control over this automation. The potential of such a co‐creative tool, and value of the guidelines, were demonstrated during the tool's evaluation by coaching practitioners at a Premier League football club. The practitioners used the tool to generate new ideas to coaching challenges, and reported evidence of different forms of creative thinking, although some also reported the need for more support for creative collaborations and solution planning. The paper ends by discussing future directions for both the Sport Sparks tool and other co‐creative AI tools.

JECT.AI is a research-based digital tool that was developed to augment journalist creative thinking. It integrates natural language processing, creative search and interactive creative thinking guidance to support journalists to discover novel ideas, angles and voices when writing new articles. This technical demonstration paper summarises JECT.AI's architecture, algorithms and key interactive features.

What do news landscapes look and sound like? And how can we transform them into tangible objects to see clusters of over-reporting, or to hear the missing voices in under-reported topics? A new artwork called Fragile Perspectives was developed to explore how news coverage clusters for different themes. Using a very large news information set generated to explore creative angles and voices in news, new tangible objects of news landscapes were produced by clustering 10000s of individual news articles into 300 dimensions, then reducing these dimensions to 3-dimensional maps. These 3-dimensional maps were then manufactured as glass objects produced using the glassblowing techniques similar to those perfected on the Venetian island of Murano, then digitally scanned to excite virtual strings to produce the sound using a data sonification method based on physical modelling sound synthesis. These glass objects and the generated sound were combined to produce the Fragile Perspectives artwork.

Sport Sparks™ is a new digital tool that has been researched and developed to augment the creative thinking of sports coaches when resolving challenges experienced by athletes. Most sports coaches work across multiple training sites and have limited opportunities and resources for creative thinking. The Sport Sparks™ tool was designed to provide ready-to-use guidance for creative thinking, via mobile devices, that is generated using automated natural language processing, rule-based reasoning and creative search. This short technical demonstration paper summarises and demonstrates with examples the different strategies and features implemented in Sport Sparks™ to augment coach creative thinking.

Creativity’s importance to organisations and businesses is now recognised to be a precondition for both design and innovation. One strategy is to introduce new forms of information system that support human creative thinking by their employees. Most successful uses have been in professional disciplines in the creative industries such as design and theatre. This paper reports the design and evaluation of a new information system that was researched and developed to support human creativity in a non-creative industry – health-and-safety in a manufacturing plant. An established risk detection and resolution process in one plant was extended with the new system to support plant employees to think creatively about resolutions to health-and-safety risks. The new system was used in a manufacturing plant for over 3 months. Results revealed that a subset of the risk resolutions generated with the new system were more creative and more complete than risk resolutions generated without the system in a corresponding period. However, the employees needed more time than was available to generate more complete risk resolutions. The evaluation results led to coordinated changes to both the information system and work practices associated with it.

This paper reports the evaluation of a new digital support tool designed to increase journalist creativity and productivity in newsrooms. After outlining the tool's principles, interactive features and architecture, the paper reports the installation and use of the tool over 2 months by 12 journalists in the newsrooms of 3 newspapers. Results from this evaluation revealed that tool use was associated with published news articles rated as more novel but not more valuable than published articles written by the same journalists without the tool. However, tool use did not increase journalist productivity. The evaluation results were used to inform future changes to the digital creativity support tool.

There has been little research to investigate the impact of software to support the care for older people with dementia care. This article reports the evaluation of software adapted to support one key person-centered task for the care of older residents with dementia – recording and sharing daily care notes. The evaluation on the dementia wing of 1 residential home for over 6 months revealed that use of the software on mobile devices carried by the carers increased the number and volume of daily care notes recorded, but only for the types of content that were already being recorded by carers. Carers reported more advantages that resulted from daily care notes once in digital form than from the documenting task, as well as barriers to the use of mobile digital software to record daily care notes.

This paper reports the design and first evaluations of new digital support for journalists to discover and examine crea-tive angles on news stories under development. The support integrated creative news search algorithms, interactive crea-tive sparks and reusable concept cards into one daily work tool of journalists. The first evaluations of INJECT by jour-nalists in their places of work to write published news sto-ries revealed that the journalists generated new angles on existing stories rather than new stories, changed their writ-ing behaviour, and reported evidence that INJECT use had the potential to increase the objectivity and the boldness of journalism methods used.

This paper reports the results of research that sought the long-term uptake of digital support for human creativity to improve health-and-safety in 3 manufacturing plants over an 18-month period. The systematic risk detection and reso-lution processes of each plant were extended with digital support for employees to think creatively about resolutions to encountered health-and-safety risks. The different uses, successful and unsuccessful, revealed which digitized crea-tivity techniques were effective, different enablers for and barriers to the uptake of the digital creativity support in complex work places, and the importance of management support for aligning work practices and digital capabilities to support creative thinking.

This paper reports an evaluation of digital support for human creativity to improve health-and-safety in one manufacturing plant. It reports the use of this support as part of the plant's risk management process over 66 working days. Results revealed that this use led to more complete, more useful and more novel risk resolutions, compared with the original paper process, and informed how digital creativity support can be rolled out across manufacturing plants, as well as to other domains not recognized as creative.

Requirements engineering is a creative process in which stakeholders and engineers work together to create ideas for new products, services and systems. Several techniques have proved to be effective for eliciting creative requirements. Yet, most of these techniques are heavy to implement and require long periods of time to be applied correctly. Few lightweight creativity techniques have been developed for use in requirements engineering. One such lightweight technique is the creativity trigger, which provides simple guidance to stakeholders and engineers to help produce creative requirements. While easy to apply, creativity triggers were derived informally from experience of practitioners and have not been validated in a systematic way. This paper reports design and preliminary validation research, that sought to provide empirical foundations for a more complete set of lightweight creativity triggers, to be used by stakeholders and engineers to quickly and simply generate new and useful requirements on products, services and systems.

Creative processes involve a repertoire of digital devices ranging from mobile phones over tablets and desktop computers to electronic whiteboards and wall-sized displays. While some integration across multiple devices is supported more sophisticated kinds of integration that connect devices and amplify their potential are limited. Many creative practices also rely on physical materials and tools. This will workshop investigate how the combination of physical and digital artifacts can support creative work practices. In this context, we propose to examine: Individual and social creative activities; Creativity methods; Emergence and transformation of design ideas; Generative design materials; Design constraints.

In order to be successful, software (applications) must be both useful and innovative. Techniques for determining the requirements (functions and qualities) of software have traditionally focused on utility, with a prominent body of work using graphical goal modeling and analysis to ensure that system functions meet the needs (goals) of users. However, these techniques are not designed to foster creativity, meaning that resulting systems may be functionally useful but not sufficiently innovative. Further work has focused on creativity workshops for finding and developing software requirements. However, creative outputs are not grounded in user goals, are not amenable to decision support techniques, and cannot be easily captured by non-experts. In this work we report initial progress on a project aiming to combine goal modeling and creativity techniques for enhanced software Requirements Engineering (RE). We apply our methods to a historical case in air traffic control, providing example outcomes, illustrating the benefits of a creativity- and goal-oriented approach to early software development.

This paper reports the development and deployment of digi-tal support for human creativity in a domain outside of the creative industries -- health-and-safety management in man-ufacturing plants. It reports applied research to extend a risk detection and resolution process at a world-class manufac-turing plant that produces tractors with creativity techniques and new digital support for the plant employees to use these techniques effectively as part of the risk detection and reso-lution process. The development of the digital support was constrained by the plant's processes, resources and manu-facturing culture, and the new digital support reported in this paper was designed for quick use across the plant with minimum training or management overhead. The paper reports the development, implementation and early evalua-tion of the creativity techniques and digital support in the plant as a demonstrator for the wider application of creativi-ty techniques and digital support tools.

There has been little research to develop computing technologies to support the care of people with dementia, in spite of the growing challenges that the condition poses for society. To design such technologies, an existing model of computer-support reflective learning was instantiated with findings from a pre-design study in one residential home. The result was a mobile device running an adapted enterprise social media app to support person-centred care. Evaluations of the device and app in two residential homes revealed that use of the app both motivated and increased different styles of care note recording, but little reflective learning was identified or reported. The results suggest the need for more comprehensive and flexible computer-based support for reflective learning about residents in their care – and new designs of this more comprehensive support are also introduced.

An industrial experience of the use of a method for discovering customer requirements with which to configure an off-the-shelf software package for implementation is reported. The method uses an adapted form of product variability model to provide common ground between the customer and supplier about requirements and capabilities. An associated decision support software tool guides the supplier and customer through a model-based walkthrough to discover new requirements, based on equivalent capabilities described in the product variability model. We applied the method in the work processes of the commercial provider of a software-based learning management system, and collected quantitative and qualitative data from supplier-customer interactions. Our first experiences with the method led to an increased exposure and expression of customer requirements in the customer-supplier dialogue, compared to the baseline dialogue during software package demonstrations. The paper also reports some first lessons learned to improve the method and adopt its use with other software supplier organizations.

This paper advocated the use of computer-based serious games as a form of creativity support tool. Whilst the use of serious games has grown considerably in recent years, support for players to think creatively is often implicit in the game, and does not exploit the wide range of creativity techniques and software tools available. This paper made the case for explicit creativity support in serious games, which is applied to inform a serious game developed to train carers in creativity techniques to deliver more person-centred care to people with dementia.

This paper reports a new mobile software app to support creative thinking by carers for people with dementia. The design of the app was informed by both pre-studies that demonstrated the potential of investigating challenging behaviors in non-care domains to improve person-centered care, and a model of creative problem solving adapted to dementia care. The resulting app implements different versions of the Other Worlds creativity technique to generate then reflect on ideas to improve resident care. An evaluation of the app in one residential home revealed that carers were able to use the app as described in the model, and deliver novel care to one resident in the home.

The purpose of requirements validation is to determine whether a large requirements set will lead to the achievement of system-related goals under different conditions — a task that needs automation if it is to be performed quickly and accurately. One reason for the current lack of software tools to undertake such validation is the absence of the computational mechanisms needed to associate scenario, system specification and goal analysis tools. Therefore, in this paper, we report first research experiments in developing these new capabilities, and demonstrate them with a non-trivial example associated with a Rolls Royce aircraft engine software component.

Creativity has been the subject of considerable research over the last 60 years. This keynote will argue that most requirements work is creative but not recognized as such. It will summarize recent applications of creativity theories and techniques to requirements work, then posit the general case that most requirements activities involve information search and idea discovery, and hence can be characterized as creative. Requirements research reported over the 21 years of this conference series will be reframed using theories of creativity as information search and idea discovery to support this argument, alongside macro-economic drivers and the shifting landscape of computing and design disciplines and conferences. The keynote will end with a call for researchers and practitioners at RE@21 to reframe requirements work as creative endeavors.

This short piece provides an introduction to a panel session that will take place at the RE'13 conference. The purpose of the panel will be to explore different possible future directions of the RE conference and its community. This piece outlines the arguments that will be made by each of the panelists to direct the conference and community towards different perspectives - both more academic - and practitioner-oriented.

For many Services Research and Service Design are emerging, crossing and in some cases redefining disciplinary boundaries. The user, value and worth centred ethos of human–computer interaction (HCI...

This paper presents the findings of an exploratory study within a real-life context that investigates participant behaviour and emergent user roles in asynchronous distributed collaborative idea generation by a defined community of users. In the study, a high-fidelity prototype of an online virtual ideas room was built and used by a Community of Interest consisting of representatives from 10 different voluntary organisations spread across Denmark. The study revealed five user roles, which the authors propose that future asynchronous distributed collaborative idea generation platforms should consider.

This poster reports research to introduce creative problem solving techniques and software to the care for people with dementia in residential homes.

This vision paper considers the role of power and politics in requirements engineering (RE). It offers a working definition of both terms and reviews the existing literature both in RE and related disciplines. It argues that, given the increased complexity, uncertainty and organisational embeddedness faced by RE in practice, power and politics have become increasingly relevant factors, and that they have not as yet been given adequate consideration. Building upon recent relevant research, a research agenda is proposed that presents a methodological framework which examines power and politics through the structure of power relations and the process of decision-making. This framework will require validation through empirical research as a first step to developing models of power and politics that could be of practical use for RE.

This industrial experience paper reports the results of a survey of business analysts to understand the barriers that they perceive are inhibiting effective requirements work in business-oriented projects. The survey was designed to investigate a mismatch between requirements education, training and practice that, we conjecture, was inhibiting effective requirements work by business analysts. Results revealed that, in spite of the education and training undertaken by many business analysts, their involvement in requirement projects appears to be often ad hoc and ineffective. This paper reports factors that business analysts cited as preventing them from applying their requirements analysis knowledge in practice and becoming effective professionals engaged in business analysis and associated systems engineering activities. Findings have implications not only for requirements education and training but also more effective use of requirements resources in projects.

End-user involvement in software engineering is an ambivalent topic. However, novel paradigms such as service-oriented computing suggest more active end-user involvement to gather individual needs for software personalization. In this paper, we present a mobile requirements elicitation tool which enables end-users to blog needs in situ without analysts' facilitation.

This paper presents our experiences of exploring how i* modelling can be used as a bridge between informal air traffic management (ATM) operational concepts and formal agent-based simulation. We report our work on an EU airspace design project that describes a revised concept of operations for lower level airspace around airports, and includes simulation based safety analysis of the critical scenarios. We describe our research towards using i* to address two challenges-how to model the revised concept from the informal concept of operations document, and how to present safety critical scenarios to operational experts. Modelling strategic aspects of a concept of operations is new to ATM, and we draw upon our experiences to provide lessons learned and directions for future work.

This mini-tutorial proposes participants a fun and refreshing learning moment. Through actually playing improvisational theatre games in groups themselves, participants will be given the chance to feel what it takes to innovate in teams, and will learn new ways to generate creative ideas when eliciting requirements.

This vision paper frames requirements engineering as a creative problem solving process. Its purpose is to enable requirements researchers and practitioners to recruit relevant theories, models, techniques and tools from creative problem solving to understand and support requirements processes more effectively. It uses 4 drivers to motivate the case for requirements engineering as a creative problem solving process. It then maps established requirements activities onto one of the longest-established creative problem solving processes, and uses these mappings to locate opportunities for the application of creative problem solving in requirements engineering. The second half of the paper describes selected creativity theories, techniques, software tools and training that can be adopted to improve requirements engineering research and practice. The focus is on support for problem and idea finding - two creative problem solving processes that our investigation revealed are poorly supported in requirements engineering. The paper ends with a research agenda to incorporate creative processes, techniques, training and tools in requirements projects.

For the first time at an RE conference we propose a formal debate on a topic of critical importance to the RE community. The debate format is based on that of the Economist newspaper, in turn derived from the long-standing Oxford Union practices.

Researchers highlight end-user involvement in system design as an important concept for developing useful and usable solutions. However, end-user involvement in software engineering is still an open-ended topic. Novel paradigms such as service-oriented computing strengthen the need for more active end-user involvement in order to provide systems that are tailored to individual end-user needs. Our work is based on the fact that the majority of end-users are familiar with mobile devices and use an increasing number of mobile applications. A mobile tool enabling end-user led requirements elicitation could be just one of many applications installed on end-users' mobile devices. In this paper, we present a framework of end-user involvement in requirements elicitation which motivates our research. The main contribution of our research is a tool-supported requirements elicitation approach allowing end-users to document needs in situ. Furthermore, we present first evaluation results to highlight the feasibility of on-site end-user led requirements elicitation.

This mini-tutorial introduces Web services and service-centric systems, identifies their impact on requirements engineering, and introduces new tools and techniques for engineer requirements for service-centric systems.

In this paper, we describe a creativity workshop that was used in a large research project, called APOSDLE, to generate creative ideas and requirements for a work-integrated learning system. We present an analysis of empirical data collected during and after the workshop. On the basis of this analysis, we conclude that the work-shop was an efficient way of generating ideas for future system development. These ideas, on average, were used at least as much as requirements from other sources in writing use cases, and 18 months after the workshop were seen to have a similar degree of influence on the project to other requirements. We make some observations about the use of more and less creative ideas, and about the techniques used to generate them. We end with suggestions for further work.

Rolls-Royce control systems are complex, safety critical and developed in ever-compressed timescales. Scenario techniques are utilised during systems design, safety analysis and systems verification. Scenarios can be used to improve requirements quality and to ensure greater confidence in requirements coverage for both normal and exception behaviour. A study was undertaken to investigate whether the ART-SCENE process and tool could enable engineers to identify exception behaviours earlier in the system design process, thus reducing cost and improving quality. ART-SCENE provides automatic generation of scenarios and alternative course events through the Scenario Presenter. These recognition cues are used to prompt engineers to identify deviations that may otherwise be missed. This paper describes a comparative evaluation between ART-SCENE and a standard hazard identification technique to assess the effectiveness of this approach.

Service-centric software systems offer new opportunities for requirements processes. This paper reports a new tool designed to increase the completeness of system requirements using information about designs and implementations of web services. It presents an algorithm for retrieving web services in domains that are analogical to a current requirements problem, to support creative thinking about requirements for that problem. It describes how the algorithm parses and analogically matches natural language descriptions of system requirements and web service descriptions. The paper also reports 2 evaluations of the tool that demonstrate improvements to specifications of requirements for a system in the automotive domain.

Requirements engineering is a creative process in which stakeholders work together to create ideas for new software systems that are eventually expressed as requirements. This paper reports a workshop that integrated creativity techniques with different types of use case and system context modeling to discover stakeholder requirements for EASM, a future air space management software system to enable the more effective, longer-term planning of UK and European airspace use. The workshop was successful in that it provided a range of outputs that were later assessed for their novelty and usefulness in the final specification of the EASM software. The paper describes the workshop structure, gives examples of outputs from it, and uses these results to answer 2 research questions about the utility of creativity techniques and workshops that had not been answered in previous research.

This paper reports the integration of satisfaction arguments into i* goal modelling to support analyses of the impact of new software systems on system-wide goals. Integration is based on a conceptual model that relates satisfaction argument and i* model concepts. New impact analysis procedures based on the integrated models and satisfaction arguments are introduced.

This scientific evaluation paper investigates the effectiveness of different scenario forms and uses on requirements discovery. Lt reports results from the application of scenario tools during the specification of requirements on socio-technical systems to improve the environmental impact of aircraft operations at a regional UK airport. Stakeholders walked through scenarios in both text and visual simulation form, and discovered requirements during workshops and whilst observing actors in their workplace. Results revealed both qualitative and quantitative differences in discovered requirements that have potential implications for models of scenario-based requirements discovery and the design of scenario tools.

Scenarios are widely and successfully used to discover requirements for software-intensive systems. Recent advances in mobile computing technologies mean that mobile tools can support scenario-based techniques in the workplace, with potential benefits to requirements processes. To explore this idea we have been developing the Mobile Scenario Presenter (MSP) tool and used it successfully in a number of evaluation studies and projects. The MSP supports analysts working in the field to better understand the work context of a future system 's end users. The interactive tool demo allows RE experts to actively use the MSP to explore its capabilities and benefits.

Requirements is too often seen as a "stenographer's task", one where the requirements engineer passively listens and records while the stakeholders state their needs. However, this approach relies on stakeholders knowing what they need, and what they want. Experience tells us that except for rare visionaries, people do not know what they want until they see it. Many of the useful products that we take for granted today, did not come about from the stakeholders' imagination, but from an invention. In this tutorial we explain and illustrate how to use creative techniques to invent requirements that result in more useful, usable and competitive products. We provide a guide for invention, and show participants how to use this guide to invent innovative requirements for a familiar system.

This paper describes our REDEPEND tool for i* goal modelling and analysis, and new features designed to make it more usable and useful. Pattern-based techniques that generate text requirements statements from graphical i* models improve the productivity and utility of REDEPEND in requirements projects

Recent advances in mobile computing technologies mean that mobile tools have the potential to support scenario-based techniques in the workplace, with potential benefits to requirements processes. However, mobile requirements engineering (RE) tools are a new idea, and little is known about their advantages and weaknesses. This paper reports empirical research to explore the use of mobile RE tools in practice. It describes a mobile scenario tool that we developed to discover requirements directly in the user's work context. It also describes the results from 3 evaluation studies that demonstrate that these tools can support workplace requirements discovery and documentation, although mobile RE tools pose new challenges that remain to be overcome

This workshop summary presents an overview of the one-day International Workshop on Models and Processes for the Evaluation of off-the-shelf Components (MPEC'05), held in conjunction with the 27th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'05). Details about MPEC'05 may be found at http://www.lsi.upc.edu/events/mpec/.

Scenarios are often used for discovering requirements using established techniques, but how such scenarios are initially developed is not so well understood. This experience paper reports the application of one scenario-based approach - RESCUE - to discover requirements for DMAN, an air traffic management system for the UK's National Air Traffic Services. A retrospective analysis of the DMAN use cases, scenarios and requirements artifacts revealed the importance of diverse information sources in the specification of use cases that enabled systematic requirements discovery. Results were used to explore 3 research questions that arose in previous studies. The paper reports lessons from this experience and offers guidelines that practitioners can apply in their requirements processes and academics can use to inform their research.

What influences the way people in industry (including commerce and government) do their requirements work? This paper, using a short questionnaire, found that the main influences were training, an organisation's own standards, tools, the regulator, first principles, and experienced colleagues. Sources of process knowledge outside organisations had little influence.

The i* approach includes the construction of strategic dependency models (SD) developed to model information systems that can be applied in a wide variety of contexts. We are interested in the formulation of metrics over i* models to be used in components system architectures analysis. These metrics are defined to analyse the models with respect to some properties that are interesting for the system being modelled, such as security, efficiency or accuracy. Metrics are defined in terms of the actors and dependencies of the models and the results of their evaluation are used to inform multiple component selection. As the definition and evaluation of the property metrics are cumbersome activities, the need of tool support arises. Thus, we have enlarged REDEPEND, a Microsoft Visio plug-in that graphically models system goals using the i* formalism, to support the definition and evaluation of architectural properties obtaining the REDEPEND-REACT prototype.

Requirements engineering is a creative process in which stakeholders and designers work together to create ideas for new systems that are eventually expressed as requirements. This paper describes RESCUE, a scenario driven requirements engineering process that includes workshops that integrate creativity techniques with different types of use case and system context modeling. It reports research in which RESCUE creativity workshops were used to discover stakeholder and system requirements for MSP, a future air traffic management system to enable the more effective, longer term planning of European airspace use. The workshops were successful in that they provided new and important outputs for subsequent requirements processes. The paper describes the workshops structures and results, and answers 3 important research questions.

Requirements engineering is a creative process in which stakeholders and designers work together to create ideas for new systems that are eventually expressed as requirements. However, many requirements engineering or software development methods do not encourage or support creative thinking, let alone integrate it with existing modeling and analysis processes. This paper describes RESCUE, a scenario-driven requirements engineering process that includes workshops that integrate creativity techniques with different types of use case and system context modelling. It reports a case study in which RESCUE creativity workshops were used to discover stakeholder and system requirements for DMAN, a future air traffic management system for managing departures from major European airports. The workshop was successful in that it provided new and important outputs for subsequent requirements processes. The paper describes the workshop structure and wider RESCUE process, important results and key lessons learned.

Software tools that support or automate software engineering tasks are typically available on traditional desktop-based workstations. In contrast, mobile tools for requirements engineers offer considerable potential. In the last few years the capabilities of mobile devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) have advanced considerably. These devices now provide faster processing, increased storage, and improved connectivity. Hence, mobile computing will become a dominant computing paradigm. These developments let us envision mobile tools for RE that are sophisticated enough to be used in real-world projects.

There has recently been a trend in requirements engineering towards combining techniques in order to complement the deficiencies of one with the strengths of another. RESCUE is a process that continues this tradition and combines human activity modelling and i* system goal modelling in a concurrent engineering approach to support the generation of more complete and correct use case models and descriptions, and hence better requirements. The process is aimed at developing large socio-technical systems where confidence in the correctness and completeness of use cases, and hence requirements, is important. The RESCUE process has been applied and tested in the specification of requirements for CORA-2, a real and large-scale socio-technical system in which computerised assistance will be provided to air traffic controllers.

Scenarios are effective for discovering requirements, but we still do not understand what types of scenario and which walkthrough techniques are most effective. We report the application of one scenario approach - CREWS-SAVRE - to discover requirements for naval and air traffic management systems with BAE Systems and Eurocontrol respectively. Results from these experiences are used to investigate important questions about the effectiveness of structured scenario walkthroughs and the level of domain-specificity most beneficial to the discovery of requirements. Lessons learned suggest that systematic walkthroughs of simple scenarios that do not contain excessive domain knowledge are more effective for discovering system requirements. This provides the reader with simple-to-use guidelines for scenario-based requirements discovery.

The traditional unit of analysis in knowledge acquisition and requirements acquisition is the method, e.g. the interview, the repertory grid etc. There are practical and theoretical difficulties with this division. A more useful concept is the method fragment, described in this paper. The method fragment is a discrete component of a method which can be used in one or more methods. The discreteness of method fragments makes it much easier to describe their strengths and weaknesses than is the case with methods, enabling the elicitor to put together a customized method to suit a particular elicitation need. In this paper we outline the concept of method fragments using worked examples, discuss issues raised and make recommendations for further work.

This paper presents results from the first of two empirical studies which examine the effectiveness of guidelines for use case authoring. The ESPRIT 21.903 CREWS long-term research project has developed style and content guidelines for authoring use cases for requirements acquisition and validation. The effectiveness of these guidelines has been evaluated under different conditions. Results indicate that: the authoring guidelines improve the overall quality of the use case prose; the different guidelines work differently and with different levels of efficiency; and use cases are never entirely correctly written; thus, they can be systematically corrected. The paper details a qualitative and quantitative comparison between guided and non-guided use case authoring. It outlines lessons learned and implications for the CREWS software tools design.

This paper proposes a new process to address the lack of guidance for acquiring requirements to enable evaluation of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software. The process is part goal-driven and part context-driven, in that it exploits models of the candidate COTS software as well as process goals to guide a requirements engineering team. The paper demonstrates the approach with selection of a commercial electronic mail system. It also describes a prototype software tool currently under development, and outlines future research directions to extend and evaluate the approach.

There is a need for interface design guidance for virtual environments, in order to avoid common usability problems. To develop such guidance an understanding of user interaction is required. Theoretical models of interaction with virtual environments are proposed, which consist of stages of interaction for task/goal oriented, exploratory and reactive modes of behaviour. The models have been evaluated through user studies and results show the models to be reasonably complete in their predictions about modes and stages of interaction. Particular stages were found to be more predominant than others. The models were shown to be less accurate about the exact flow of interaction between stages. Whilst the general organisation of stages in the models remained the same, stages were often skipped and there was backtracking to previous stages. Results have been used to refine the theoretical models for use in informing interface design guidance for virtual environments.

Scenarios, in most situations, are descriptions of required interactions between a desired system and its environment, which detail normative system behaviour. Our studies of current scenario use in requirements engineering have revealed that there is considerable interest in the use of scenarios for acquisition, elaboration and validation of system requirements. However, scenarios have seldom been used to study inappropriate or exceptional system behaviour. To account for non-normative or undesired system behaviour, it is vital to predict (‘what can go wrong’) and explore the existence or occurrence of ‘exceptions’ in a scenario when the system System, here, is not just a pure software system but is a socio-technical system which has social technical and organisation dimensions with the user as an integral part of the system. In this article, we present a prototype software tool called CREWS–SAVRE for systematic scenario generation and use. We describe the innovative features of the tool and demonstrate them with an example of tool’s use. Further, we have identified three kinds of exceptions: generic, permutation and problem exceptions, and have derived complex taxonomies of problem exceptions. We have populated SAVRE with the taxonomies of generic, permutation and problem exceptions. The exceptions can be chosen by the requirements engineer to include them in the generated scenarios to explore the correctness and completeness of requirements. In addition, the taxonomies of problem exceptions can also serve as checklists and help a requirements engineer to predict non-normative system behaviour in a scenario.

Retrieval, validation, and explanation tools are described for cooperative assistance during requirements engineering and are illustrated by a library system case study. Generic models of applications are reused as templates for modeling and critiquing requirements for new applications. The validation tools depend on a matching process which takes facts describing a new application and retrieves the appropriate generic model from the system library. The algorithms of the matcher, which implement a computational theory of analogical structure matching, are described. A theory of domain knowledge is proposed to define the semantics and composition of generic domain models in the context of requirements engineering. A modeling language and a library of models arranged in families of classes are described. The models represent the basic transaction processing or 'use case' for a class of applications. Critical difference rules are given to distinguish between families and hierarchical levels. Related work and future directions of the domain theory are discussed.

Scenarios have been advocated as a means of improving requirements engineering yet few methods or tools exist to support scenario based RE. The paper reports a method and software assistant tool for scenario based RE that integrates with use case approaches to object oriented development. The method and operation of the tool are illustrated with a financial system case study. Scenarios are used to represent paths of possible behavior through a use case, and these are investigated to elaborate requirements. The method commences by acquisition and modeling of a use case. The use case is then compared with a library of abstract models that represent different application classes. Each model is associated with a set of generic requirements for its class, hence, by identifying the class(es) to which the use case belongs, generic requirements can be reused. Scenario paths are automatically generated from use cases, then exception types are applied to normal event sequences to suggest possible abnormal events resulting from human error. Generic requirements are also attached to exceptions to suggest possible ways of dealing with human error and other types of system failure. Scenarios are validated by rule based frames which detect problematic event patterns. The tool suggests appropriate generic requirements to deal with the problems encountered. The paper concludes with a review of related work and a discussion of the prospects for scenario based RE methods and tools.

The paper presents a theory for reuse of domain knowledge during requirements engineering. The theory includes a set of formal and reusable domain abstractions, a computational analogical reasoning mechanism for their retrieval and tool support to enable both effective requirements modeling and critiquing and guided fact capture prior to retrieval. It was developed as part of the ESPRIT 6353 'Nature' basic research action. The paper argues that the theory has implications for domain modeling as well as domain knowledge reuse during requirements engineering.>

Domain abstraction reuse during requirements engineering is evaluated as a paradigm during use of a research tool. Iterative fact acquisition and abstraction retrieval, supported by example-based explanation of abstractions, are implemented in a prototype known as AIR (adviser for intelligent reuse). Observation of the use of AIRs by inexperienced software engineers reveal the effectiveness of this paradigm despite several problems. These problems are examined so as to identify improvements for future versions of intelligent requirements engineering environments.>