Elicitation of adaptive requirements using creativity triggers: a controlled experiment

Adaptive systems respond to changes in their environment by altering their behavior. Identifying the necessary adaptations is central to requirements elicitation for adaptive systems. Since the necessary or potential adaptations are usually not obvious to stakeholders, the challenge is how to effectively elicit information relevant to adaptation. One approach is to use creativity techniques to support the systematic identification and elicitation of adaptation requirements. In particular, we analyze a set of creativity triggers defined for the systematic exploration of potential adaptation requirements. We compare these triggers with brainstorming as a baseline in a controlled experiment involving 85 graduate 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 requirement fragments than solo brainstorming.

DOI 10.1145/3477314.3507076