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T08: "Creativity, the Path to Innovative Requirements" (Suzanne Robertson, Neil Maiden)

Creativity, the Path to Innovative Requirements

Tuesday, September 10th from 1400 - 1730

Where do requirements come from? The optimistic view is that the customers or users of a system tell the requirements engineer what they want. For a variety of reasons, this is rarely the case. People don't know exactly what they want, they do not know what is possible, or they cannot express their real needs, or because they think in terms of current solutions or they cannot envisage the future. Requirements engineering is increasingly a creative process in which stakeholders and designers work together to create ideas for new systems that are eventually expressed as requirements.

This half-day tutorial illustrates how we use innovative techniques to imagine, create, discover and formalise requirements. We also illustrate how creativity can be used in requirements engineering and provide a guide for running creative design workshops. This is an interactive hands-on tutorial based on experience in running creative workshops for an air traffic management system for Eurocontrol in Paris.

The tutorial is intended for different types of participants. These include academics who want to understand more about the changing nature of RE, practitioners who want to learn how to use creative techniques in the RE process, and project managers who want to understand more about the requirements process.

 

Suzanne Robertson:
Suzanne Robertson

Suzanne Robertson is a principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild. Suzanne is co-author of Mastering the Requirements Process (Addison-Wesley 1999. Current work includes research and consulting on stakeholders and all aspects of requirements. The product of this research is Volere, a complete requirements process and template for assessing requirements quality, and for specifying requirements. She is editor of the Requirements column in IEEE Software magazine.

 

Neil Maiden:
Neil Maiden Neil Maiden is a Reader and Head of the Centre for Human-Computer Interface Design, an independent research department in City University's School of Informatics. He has been directing inter-disciplinary research in requirements engineering for 15 years and has worked on numerous EPSRC- and EU-funded research projects including SIMP, NATURE, CREWS & BANKSEC. He has over 80 journal and conference publications. Details are available from www-hcid.soi.city.ac.uk.

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Last updated: 2002-06-05