A heuristic approach for supporting product innovation in requirements engineering: A controlled experiment

Abstract

[Context and motivation] While requirements engineering earlier focused on gathering requirements, it has been recognized today that creativity and innovation are required as a basis for novel products. [Question/problem] We described earlier an approach to support creativity in requirements engineering. Here, we focus on a thorough validation of the approach. [Principal ideas/results] Our approach uses semantic-based technologies to derive new idea triggers. Here, we show an evaluation of this approach. We find that the approach provides better results than other existing creativity techniques like random triggers. [Contribution] The paper provides evidence for creativity enhancement using our approach. It also shows how a controlled experiment to analyze creativity in requirements engineering can be performed. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.