CAREER: Measuring and Supporting Creativity in Developing Software Requirements

软件行业的新产品和新公司经常与现有软件竞争。这使得新产品更好地满足人们的需求并与现有产品有所不同变得非常重要。需求工程（RE）中的创造性强调开发创造性需求的关键作用，这些需求既新颖又适合给定的应用程序。现有的促进需求创造性的方法，包括多天的研讨会、工具和框架，是耗时的，通常是无效的，并且很大程度上依赖于需求分析师自己的创造性。此外，创造力有许多方面应该独立评估，但可再生能源领域几乎没有评估创造力的好工具。这个项目的目标是使用一系列基于人工智能的技术来帮助评估需求的创造性，并帮助软件工程师开发更多的创造性需求。这将包括开发界面，帮助工程师考虑更广泛的可能需求和评估可再生能源创造力的框架。研究工作还将支持课程开发，指导学生研究人员，为K-12学生，教师和软件初创公司提供以创造力为重点的培训研讨会。这个项目的成功将推进创造性软件开发的基础知识，并通过帮助开发人员成为创造性软件专业人员和增加产品和公司成功的机会来影响当地、州和国家经济。该项目侧重于两个主要目标。第一个主要目标是使用数据挖掘、机器学习和自然语言处理技术，根据现有的在线软件相关内容（如评论、产品描述、问题跟踪系统和论坛讨论）产生潜在的创造性想法。然后，这些技术将被整合到一个支持系统中，在有指导的人为干预下探索和选择创造性的需求。第二个主要目标是开发一个全面的框架，用于评估软件需求的创造性，该框架基于已建立的创造性维度，包括相关性和有效性、新颖性、优雅性和起源性。这些工具和规模将通过包括专业软件开发人员和可再生能源专家在内的用户研究来验证。提供一个自动化的机制来支持创造性需求的发现，并提供一个新的框架来评估需求的创造性，该项目解决了在软件需求工程中广泛采用创造性的基本问题。该项目由以人为中心的计算（HCC）、刺激竞争性研究的既定计划（EPSCoR）和软件和硬件基金会（SHF）共同资助。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

New products and new companies in the software industry often compete against existing software. This makes it important for new products that better meet people's needs and that differ from existing ones. Creativity in Requirements Engineering (RE) emphasizes the key role of developing creative requirements that are both novel and appropriate for a given application. Existing approaches to promote requirements creativity, including multi-day workshops, tools, and frameworks, are time-consuming, often ineffective, and largely dependent on the requirements analyst's own creativity. Moreover, creativity has a number of facets that should be assessed independently, but the field of RE has few good tools for evaluating creativity. This project's goal is to use a range of artificial intelligence-based techniques both to help assess requirement creativity and to help software engineers develop more creative requirements. This will involve both developing interfaces that help engineers consider a wider range of possible requirements and a framework for evaluating creativity in RE. The research work will also support curriculum development, mentoring of student researchers, and creativity-focused training workshops for K-12 students, teachers, and software startups. The success of this project will advance fundamental knowledge in creative software development and impact local, state, and national economies by helping developers become creative software professionals and increasing the chance that products and companies succeed.The project focuses on two main objectives. The first main objective is to use data mining, machine learning, and natural language processing techniques to generate potentially creative ideas based on existing online software-related content such as reviews, product descriptions, issue tracking systems, and forum discussions. These techniques will then be integrated into a support system to explore and select creative requirements with guided human intervention. The second main objective is to develop a comprehensive framework for evaluating the creativity of software requirements, based on well-established dimensions of creativity that include relevance and effectiveness, novelty, elegance, and genesis. These tools and scales will be validated through user studies including professional software developers and experts in RE. Providing an automated mechanism to support the discovery of creative requirements and a novel framework to evaluate the creativity of requirements, this project addresses the fundamental issues that act as barriers to the wide adoption of creativity in software requirements engineering.This project is jointly funded by Human Centered Computing (HCC), the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), and Software & Hardware Foundations (SHF).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.