Elicitation of Adaptive Requirements Using Creativity Triggers: A Controlled Experiment

TL;DR

This paper investigates the use of creativity triggers to improve the elicitation of adaptation requirements in adaptive systems, demonstrating their effectiveness over traditional brainstorming in a controlled experiment.

Contribution

It introduces a set of creativity triggers for systematic exploration of adaptation requirements and validates their effectiveness through an empirical comparison with brainstorming.

Findings

Creativity triggers elicited more adaptation requirements than brainstorming.

Triggers are suitable for efficient elicitation of adaptive requirements.

Significant increase in requirement fragments with triggers.

Abstract

Adaptive systems react to changes in their environment by changing their behavior. Identifying these needed adaptations is very difficult, but central to requirements elicitation for adaptive systems. As the necessary or potential adaptations are typically not obvious to the stakeholders, the problem is how to effectively elicit adaptation-relevant information. One approach is to use creativity techniques to support the systematic identification and elicitation of adaptation requirements. In particular, here, we analyze a set of creativity triggers defined for systematic exploration of potential adaptation requirements. We compare these triggers with brainstorming as a baseline in a controlled experiment with 85 master students. The results indicate that the proposed triggers are suitable for the efficient elicitation of adaptive requirements and that the 15 trigger questions produce significantly more requirements fragments than solo brainstorming.