What is the purpose of creativity techniques in Requirements Engineering, and what are they NOT suited for?
They generate innovative requirements, an initial vision, and "excitement factors" early on — but are poor at producing fine-grained, detailed behavioral requirements.
Purpose: Creativity techniques serve to develop innovative requirements, delineate an initial vision of the system, and elicit excitement factors.
Not suited for: Creativity techniques are usually not well suited for establishing fine-grained requirements about the system behavior.
Use creativity techniques early in the process to generate ideas and vision, then switch to other techniques (interviews, document analysis, etc.) for detailed behavioral requirements.
Common creativity techniques:
- Brainstorming / Brainwriting
- Mind mapping
- Six thinking hats
- Personas and scenarios
- Future workshops
Kano Model Connection: Creativity techniques help discover "excitement factors" (delighters) - features users didn't know they wanted but love when they see them. These differentiate your product from competitors.
Go deeper:
Kano model (Wikipedia) — the "attractive/delighter" quality category that creativity techniques are best at surfacing.