Automated Support to Capture Creative Requirements via Requirements Reuse

Abstract

Increasingly competitive software industry, where multiple systems serve the same application domain and compete for customers, favors software with creative features. To promote software creativity, research has proposed multi-day workshops with experienced facilitators, and semi-automated tools to provide a limited support for creative thinking. Such approach is either time-consuming and demands substantial involvement from analysts with creative abilities, or useful only for existing large-scale software with a rich issue tracking system. In this paper, we present a novel framework, useful for both new and existing systems, providing an end-to-end automation to support creativity. In particular, the framework reuses freely available requirements for similar software, leverages state-of-the-art natural language processing and machine learning techniques, and generates candidate creative requirements. We apply the framework on three application domains: Antivirus, Web Browser, and File Sharing, and further report a human subject evaluation. The results demonstrate our framework’s ability to generate creative features and provoke innovative thinking among developers with various experience levels.