Creativity Techniques for More Creative Requirements: Theory vs. Practice

Requirements engineering was initially regarded as a front-end activity to form a basis for the coming activities of software development, which can be achieved by gathering and producing unambiguous and consistent requirements. However, in recent years, requirements engineering has been recognized as a creative process. A systematic literature review followed by an online questionnaire with practitioners were employed to identify a comprehensive overview of existing empirical evidence using creativity techniques in the requirements engineering process. The results show a limited range of applied creativity techniques with insufficient empirical evidence to adequately evaluate if the techniques create more creative requirements. The contribution of this study is threefold: First, it compares which creativity techniques have been empirically evaluated in literature. Second, it compares the identified creativity techniques. Third, it includes an examination of which creativity techniques are used in industry.