Supporting and monitoring the creativity of IS personnel during the requirements engineering process

The early stages of the RE process involve developing understanding of a problem situation, the problem domain, and the requirements for achieving improvements in the problem situation. How requirements engineers work to develop this understanding is poorly understood. The findings from several field studies of the RE process show that the process is creative and opportunistic, involving adaptive and responsive exploration of the problem space. The question of how to support and monitor the process remains. We have approached this problem by examining the complexity of the requirements models in a number of laboratory based studies. By recording the RE process using a design rationale notation and analysing the complexity of the requirements models, we have traced the oscillations in complexity throughout the process, we have called this the catastrophe-cycle of the requirements modelling process. We discuss the usefulness of design rationale in supporting and monitoring the RE process, examine the implications of this research for managing the creative and insight-driven RE process, and highlight areas for future research.