Where do requirements come from?

Abstract

What should a product do? What qualities should it have? How do we determine these requirements for new generations of products? Requirements engineering is an activity in which a wide variety of stakeholders work together to answer these questions. The answers do not arrive by themselves, there is a need to-ask, observe, discover, and increasingly create requirements. If we want to build competitive and imaginative products that avoid re-implementing the obvious, we must make creativity part of the requirements process. Indeed, the importance of creative thinking is expected to increase over the next decade. Unfortunately, most RE research and practice does not recognize this important trend. We highlight some important information sources for creativity and innovation and present some useful examples of creative RE as references to guide and inspire readers.