Creativity patterns guide: Support for the application of creativity techniques in requirements engineering

Abstract

Creativity techniques are tools for stimulating creative thinking. The importance of creativity fostering techniques in software development has been recognized and investigated by researchers for over a decade, yet the greater software engineering (SE) community makes little use of the myriads of techniques available. In order to encourage a wider adoption and to support the use of creativity techniques in software development, we have reviewed a large number of creativity techniques and have created a Creativity Patterns Guide. This paper describes the part of the guide tailored for the requirements engineering phase. The guide has been evaluated in real-world projects. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.