Creative goal modeling for innovative requirements

Journal article, 2019

When determining the functions and qualities (a.k.a. requirements) for a system, creativity is key to drive innovation and foster business success. However, creative requirements must be practically operationalized, grounded in concrete functions and system interactions. Requirements Engineering (RE) has produced a wealth of methods centered around goal modeling, in order to graphically explore the space of alternative requirements, linking functions to goals and dependencies. In parallel work, creativity theories from the social sciences have been applied to the design of creative requirements workshops, pushing stakeholders to develop innovative systems. Goal models tend to focus on what is known, while creativity workshops are expensive, require a specific skill set to facilitate, and produce mainly paper-based, unstructured outputs. Objective Our aim in this work is to explore beneficial combinations of the two areas of work in order to overcome these and other limitations, facilitating creative requirements elicitation, supported by a simple extension of a well-known and structured requirements modeling technique. Method We take a Design Science approach, iterating over exploratory studies, design, and summative validation studies. Results The result is the Creative Leaf tool and method supporting creative goal modeling for RE. Conclusion We support creative RE by making creativity techniques more accessible, producing structured digital outputs which better match to existing RE methods with associated analysis procedures and transformations.