Back from CreaRE
The CreaRE workshop took place last week and I am currently writing the reports. For all those who could not be with us and will not read the workshop proceedings, a short summary at this place:
First, in her invited key note talk, Chris Rupp told us that practitioners do not use creativity techniques. However, they are creative. She summarized and opposed different experts´ views with respect to creativity. Is creativity chaotic or systematic? Do we need to be mentally ill for being creative, be a genius or can everyone be creative?
Anyone can, be sure. Being competent is helpfull and being intelligent also. The environment can influence creativity and especially whether a creative idea becomes a new product.
The student experiment of Victoria Sakhnini, Luisa Mich and Daniel M. Berry showed that a number of two persons per group is ideal when being creative - at least in the tested context.
Koen van Turnhout, Stijn Hoppenbrouwers, Paul Jacobs, Jasper Jeurens, Wina Smeenk, and René Bakker presented us their experiences with the "1:10:100" Method. As they are no requirements engineers, but designers, they added new perspectives on creativity.
Hans Hartmann advocated for involving testers into the process of requirements engineering, because their "evil creativity" adds ideas which other roles might now have.
This year, for the first time, CreaRE invited the paper authors and program committee members to present results of their creative activities in an art exhibition. We were able to enjoy the following exhibits:
• Several really professional photos by Chris Rupp (see also on: https://www.chrisrupp.net/)
• A specification and sample of a perfect bagel satisfying all requirements, by Daniel Berry (see also: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~dberry/#RiseAndShine)
• Some short lyrics by Andrea Herrmann
Unfortunately, the hotel could not provide us with a piano. Otherwise, Hans Hartmann would have given a concert during the coffee break!
And, last but not least, we discussed questions for further research on creativity in RE or RE in creativity. The resulting list is too long for a blog posting, but the most important are:
First, in her invited key note talk, Chris Rupp told us that practitioners do not use creativity techniques. However, they are creative. She summarized and opposed different experts´ views with respect to creativity. Is creativity chaotic or systematic? Do we need to be mentally ill for being creative, be a genius or can everyone be creative?
Anyone can, be sure. Being competent is helpfull and being intelligent also. The environment can influence creativity and especially whether a creative idea becomes a new product.
The student experiment of Victoria Sakhnini, Luisa Mich and Daniel M. Berry showed that a number of two persons per group is ideal when being creative - at least in the tested context.
Koen van Turnhout, Stijn Hoppenbrouwers, Paul Jacobs, Jasper Jeurens, Wina Smeenk, and René Bakker presented us their experiences with the "1:10:100" Method. As they are no requirements engineers, but designers, they added new perspectives on creativity.
Hans Hartmann advocated for involving testers into the process of requirements engineering, because their "evil creativity" adds ideas which other roles might now have.
This year, for the first time, CreaRE invited the paper authors and program committee members to present results of their creative activities in an art exhibition. We were able to enjoy the following exhibits:
• Several really professional photos by Chris Rupp (see also on: https://www.chrisrupp.net/)
• A specification and sample of a perfect bagel satisfying all requirements, by Daniel Berry (see also: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~dberry/#RiseAndShine)
• Some short lyrics by Andrea Herrmann
Unfortunately, the hotel could not provide us with a piano. Otherwise, Hans Hartmann would have given a concert during the coffee break!
And, last but not least, we discussed questions for further research on creativity in RE or RE in creativity. The resulting list is too long for a blog posting, but the most important are:
- How do we know that we have created enough ideas and which of them are good?
- How can we know which technique works best in a specific given setting? Experienced persons judge this intuitively, but how can this intuitive knowledge be made explicit?
- What about the difference between brand new ideas and incremental improvements? How are these types of ideas supported by different techniques?
AndreaHerrmann - 18. Apr, 17:55
