Automated Support to Capture Creative Requirements via Requirements Reuse

• Published in: Reuse in the Big Data Era pp. 47 - 63
• Main Authors: Do, Quoc Anh, Chekuri, Surendra Raju, Bhowmik, Tanmay
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Creativity; Language model; Natural language processing; Requirement boilerplate; Requirements engineering; Requirements reuse
• ISBN: 9783030228873; 3030228878
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-22888-0_4

Increasingly competitive software industry, where multiple systems serve the same application domain and compete for customers, favors software with creative features. To promote software creativity, research has proposed multi-day workshops with experienced facilitators, and semi-automated tools to provide a limited support for creative thinking. Such approach is either time-consuming and demands substantial involvement from analysts with creative abilities, or useful only for existing large-scale software with a rich issue tracking system. In this paper, we present a novel framework, useful for both new and existing systems, providing an end-to-end automation to support creativity. In particular, the framework reuses freely available requirements for similar software, leverages state-of-the-art natural language processing and machine learning techniques, and generates candidate creative requirements. We apply the framework on three application domains: Antivirus, Web Browser, and File Sharing, and further report a human subject evaluation. The results demonstrate our framework’s ability to generate creative features and provoke innovative thinking among developers with various experience levels.