Elicitation of Adaptive Requirements Using Creativity Triggers: A Controlled Experiment
This work addresses the challenge of identifying non-obvious adaptations for stakeholders in adaptive systems, though it is incremental as it builds on existing creativity techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of eliciting adaptation requirements for adaptive systems by comparing a set of creativity triggers with brainstorming in a controlled experiment involving 85 master students, finding that the triggers produced significantly more requirements fragments.
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.