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Group versus individual use of power-only EPMcreate as a creativity enhancement technique for requirements elicitation

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Abstract

Creativity is often needed in requirements elicitation, i.e., generating ideas for requirements, and therefore, techniques to enhance creativity are believed to be useful. How does the size of a group using the Power-Only EPMcreate (POEPMcreate) creativity enhancement technique affect the group’s and each member of the group’s effectiveness in generating requirement ideas? This paper describes an experiment in which individuals and two-person and four-person groups used POEPMcreate to generate ideas for requirements for enhancing a high school’s public Web site. The data of this experiment combined with the data of two previous experiments involving two-person and four-person groups using POEPMcreate show that, similar to what has been observed for brainstorming, the size of a group using POEPMcreate does affect the number of raw and new requirement ideas generated by the group and by the average member of the group. The data allow concluding that a two-person group using POEPMcreate generates more raw and new requirement ideas, both per group and per group member or individual, than does a four-person group and than does an individual. This conclusion is partially corroborated by qualitative data gathered from a survey of professional business or requirements analysts about group sizes and creativity enhancement techniques.

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Notes

  1. The general form of a subhypothesis is:

    “The number of members of an elicitation group using \(\left \{ \begin {array}{l} E :~\text {EPMcreate} \\ P :~\text { POEPMcreate} \end {array} \right \}\) has no effect on the \(\left \{ \begin {array}{l} T :~\text {total number of requirement ideas per group} \\ A :~\text {average number of requirement ideas per group member} \end {array} \right \}\) of \(\left \{ \begin {array}{l} R :~\text {raw} \\ N :~\text {new} \end {array} \right \}\) requirement ideas generated.” The name of any subhypothesis is “H” followed by concatenation of the labels designating the choices made to construct the subhypothesis. Each label is the first letter of the phrase that it labels.

  2. The phrase “individual creativity” is a technical term from the creativity assessment field that means natural, unassisted, original creativity of the individual and not just individual as opposed to group creativity (Kaufman and Sternberg 2006).

  3. In cooperative education at the University of Waterloo, each student works for pay, over his or her four years, one term per year, in an off-campus job, generally in his or her area of study. A CS or SE student typically works in a computing-related job, often in software development. In some cases, the student ends up getting a permanent job at one of his or her co-op employers.

  4. 4 We had to wait at least a year and then until the Fall term between rounds to get a large enough crop of new potential subjects, a.k.a. new students, who had never participated in any of our experiments.

  5. The number of asterisks indicates the order of magnitude of the deciding P-value, i.e., the number of 0s after the decimal point before the first non-0 digit. Also, a single asterisk is shown only if the P-value is less than 0.05.

  6. Thus, there is an interaction between the independent variables experiment number and group size in their effects on the dependent variables PTR, PTN, PAR, and PAN. Section 8.3 deals with this interaction.

  7. This “less than or equal to” should be taken with the same grain of salt as is the test of whether p<α. If the number N is only a small percentage more than exactly equal to \(\frac {M}{\alpha }\), the researcher is still on shaky grounds claiming support for the hypotheses.

  8. The second and third conjuncts in this definition of the multiple comparisons problem came from private communication with William Berry, one of the authors of (Berry and Sanders 2000).

  9. http://www.iiba.org/

  10. http://www.incose.org/

  11. http://www.requirementsnetwork.com/

  12. http://discuss.it.uts.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/re-online

  13. http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Requirements-Engineering/

  14. Even though the original work was done in 1935, the work was not published formally until 1953.

  15. Beyond mentioning the overwhelming data showing that individuals are more effective than face-to-face groups at generating ideas with brainstorming, and that one negative social influence is the power of a majority in a group to inhibit a minority in the group, Ocker makes no mention of the effect of group sizes.

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Acknowledgments

Each of Victoria Sakhnini’s and Luisa Mich’s work was supported in part by a Cheriton School of Computer Science addendum to the same Canadian NSERC–Scotia Bank Industrial Research Chair that was supporting Daniel Berry. Daniel Berry’s work was supported in parts by a Canadian NSERC grant NSERC-RGPIN227055-00 and by a Canadian NSERC–Scotia Bank Industrial Research Chair NSERC-IRCPJ365473-05. The authors thank William Berry for his graciously offered and personal advice on multivariate regressions. All blame for any misapplication of this advice falls on the authors.

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  1. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada

    Victoria Sakhnini & Daniel M. Berry

  2. Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Trento, 38122, Trento, Italy

    Luisa Mich

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Correspondence to Victoria Sakhnini.

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This paper is an enhancement of a similarly titled, shorter paper (Sakhnini et al. 2013), by the same authors, published in the Proceedings of the Workshop on Creativity in Requirements Engineering (CreaRE) at the 18th Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ’2013). The workshop paper has been extended by a more detailed description of the techniques, reporting of more data gathered since submitting the workshop paper, a more detailed statistical analysis, and a strengthening of the conclusions.

This paper uses in Sections 1, 2.1 through 2.3, 9, and 12 material copied verbatim from the authors’ and others’ previous papers (Mich et al. 2005; Sakhnini et al. 2012), describing EPMcreate, POEPMcreate, the conduct of the experiment, threats, and related work.

The research conducted with human subjects described in this paper was approved in advance by the University of Waterloo’s Office of Research Ethics. Each subject was given, during his or her Step 1, the approved description of the project and was asked to sign an informed-consent form. The only subjects actually used were those that signed this form.

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There is no known potential or actual conflict of interest.

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Communicated by: Tony Gorschek

See the section titled “Compliance with Ethical Standards”, just before the references, for a statement about previous publication of parts of this paper’s contents.

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Sakhnini, V., Mich, L. & Berry, D.M. Group versus individual use of power-only EPMcreate as a creativity enhancement technique for requirements elicitation. Empir Software Eng 22, 2001–2049 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-016-9475-z

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