Acquiring Creative Requirements from the Crowd: Understanding the Influences of Personality and Creative Potential in Crowd RE

Abstract

As a creative discipline, Requirements Engineering (RE), lends importance to understanding the associated human factors. Crowd RE, the approach of acquiring requirements from members of the public—the so-called crowd—emphasizes human factors further. We investigate how human personality and creative potential influence a requirement acquisition task. These factors are of specific importance to Crowd RE because (1) crowd workers are generally not trained in RE, and (2) a key motivation in engaging them is to benefit from their creativity. We propose a sequential Crowd RE process, where workers in one stage review requirements from the previous stage and produce additional requirements. To reduce potential information overload in this process, we propose strategies for selecting requirements from one stage to expose to workers in later stages. We conducted a study on Amazon Mechanical Turk tasking 300 workers with creating requirements via the above sequential process (in the domain of smart home applications for concreteness) and tasking an additional 300 workers to rate the creativity (novelty and usefulness) of those requirements. Our findings offer insights on how to carry out Crowd RE effectively. First, we find that a crowd worker's (1) creative potential, and personality traits of openness and conscientiousness have significant positive influence on the novelty of the worker's ideas, and (2) personality traits of agreeableness and conscientiousness have significant positive influence, but extraversion has significant negative influence on the usefulness of the worker's ideas. Second, we find that exposing a worker to ideas from previous workers cognitively stimulates the worker to produce creative ideas. Third, we identify effective strategies based on personality traits and creative potential for selecting a few requirements from a pool of previous requirements to stimulate a worker.