Requirements engineering is a creative process in which stakeholders and designers work together to create ideas for new systems that are eventually expressed as requirements. This paper describes RESCUE, a scenario-driven requirements engineering process that includes workshops that integrate creativity techniques with different types of use case and system context modelling. It reports a case study in which RESCUE creativity workshops were used to discover stakeholder and system requirements for DMAN, a future air traffic management system for managing departures from major European airports. The workshop was successful in that it provided new and important outputs for subsequent requirements processes. The paper describes the workshop structure and wider RESCUE process, important results and key lessons learned. Ke y words : Requirements; creativity workshops; analogical reasoning; models of creativity; storyboarding Ca t e gorie s & S ubjec t De Requirements engineering is a creative process in which stakeholders and designers work together to create ideas for new systems that are eventually expressed as requirements. The importance of creative product design is expected to increase over the next decade. Creativity is indispensable for more innovative product development [8] , and requirements are the key abstraction that encapsulates the results of creative thinking about the vision of an innovative product. It is a trend that requirements engineering researchers and practitioners, with their current focus on elicitation, analysis and management, have yet to grasp fully. This failure means that current software development processes and methods do not encourage explicit creative thinking. However, these processes and methods are still needed to model, analyze, specify and sign-off stakeholder requirements discovered and invented using creative techniques, so new, more creative requirements engineering practices cannot be developed in isolation. Therefore, a further challenge is to integrate creative thinking techniques into mainstream requirements processes and methods. This is what we have sought to do in RESCUE. This paper reports a case study -the design and running of a creativity workshop within the RESCUE process to discover new requirements and ideas for DMAN, a new sociotechnical system for scheduling and managing the departures of aircraft from European major airports such as Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle. Increased levels of air travel can lead to bottlenecks at large airports. Eurocontrol's ASA program is tackling this problem by introducing computerized systems that will enable controllers to manage aircraft both safely and more efficiently. DMAN is one such system to be used by airport tower controllers to produce optimal sequences of aircraft departures and to aid the management of departures in the sequence, from pilot request by for a departure clearance to take off. DMAN is a socio-technical system -as well as delivering new computerized and interactive functions for controllers, it will change how tower controllers work, and introduce new human roles such as a tower departure sequence controller. The DMAN requirements project was managed by NATS on behalf of the client, Eurocontrol. The overall specification process lasted 10 months, and the creativity workshop described took place 2 months into the project. The remainder of this paper is in 5 sections. Section 2 describes the RESCUE process and where creativity workshops fit. Section 3 describes the creativity workshops and techniques in more detail, then section 4 presents the main results from the workshop. Section 5 reports 6 lessons learned for running creativity workshops within structured requirements processes. The paper ends with a discussion of issues about creative thinking that the work raises, and plans for future work. The RESCUE (Requirements Engineering with Scenarios for User-Centred Engineering) process was developed by multi-disciplinary researchers (Maiden et al. 2003a (Maiden et al. , 2003b . It supports a concurrent engineering process in which different modelling and analysis processes take place in paral-
The creativity workshops followed the structure and the design of the creativity workshops in RESCUE REF .
Integrating creativity workshops into structured requirements processes
DIS '04
Engineering Computer Science