Collaborative creativity in requirements engineering: analysis and practical advice

Requirements engineering (RE) often entails interdisciplinary groups of people working together to find novel and valuable solutions to a complex design problem. In such situations RE requires creativity in a form where interactions among stakeholders are particularly important: collaborative creativity. However, few studies have explicitly concentrated on understanding collaborative creativity in RE, resulting in limited advice for practitioners on how to support this aspect of RE. This paper provides a framework of factors characterising collaborative creative processes in RE. These factors enable a systematic investigation of the collaboratively creative nature of RE. They can potentially guide practitioners when facilitating RE efforts, and also provide researchers with ideas on where to focus when developing methods and tools for RE. © 2013 IEEE.