Call for Papers 2021

thumbnail for this post

Tenth International Workshop on Creativity in Requirements Engineering (CreaRE 2021)

Date: 12 April 2021, collocated with REFSQ’21

Place: Online

Workshop Topic, Background and Motivation

Where do great requirements come from? The development of a new IT system or the replacement or radical enhancement of an existing IT system provides the chance to gather innovative ideas, to make radical improvements, and to reinvent the work process. However, current techniques for analyzing customer-provided documents and existing systems lead to identifying only the basic requirements that the IT system should fulfill, and elicitation techniques such as stakeholder interviews help identify ideas for the incremental improvement of a system. Thus, these standard techniques lead to a conservative requirements specification with little innovation potential.

Creativity techniques help stakeholders identify delighter requirements, which make aspects of the new system a real positive surprise. These delighters generally are highly innovative features. In recent years, methods such as Design Thinking have gained popularity in industry and reflect the need for creativity to develop new innovative products and innovate on existing products. But this is only one possible application of creativity, while there are many more facets of creativity that can benefit RE in a wide range of settings. The CreaRE workshop provides a platform for introducing, discussing and elaborating creativity techniques used for Requirements Engineering (RE).

In spite of the importance of creativity in RE, there are far more publications about survey techniques, document-centric techniques and observation techniques for requirements elicitation, than there are about the use of creativity in RE. Many practical questions are still open, especially concerning the applicability and reliability of these techniques in different contexts or the completeness and post-processing of the requirements resulting from a creativity session. Different software applications domains such as embedded systems, multimedia products or customer-specific business applications may require creativity techniques to be applied differently, and these techniques also contribute to shaping the landscape of emerging fields such as the Internet of Things and smart ecosystems. Meanwhile, the field of creativity techniques itself is also changing as tool support and trends like multimedia use with creativity techniques, mobile computing, and online participation demand different approaches, which provides new opportunities for involving creativity in RE but also introduces new challenges.

Goals of the Workshop

The purpose of the CreaRE’21 workshop is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, experiences and research results. The participants will learn from the speakers and from each other, and will possibly gain hands-on experiences in applying creativity techniques themselves. A special goal for this edition of the workshop is to use the ten-year anniversary of the CreaRE workshop to reflect on how the landscape has changed in the decade since it first was held in 2010, and to discuss what the future role of creativity in RE might look like, according to experts in the field.

Workshop Topics

The workshop brings together the topics creativity and requirements. Workshop topics include, but are not restricted to:

  • Analyzing how the global Covid-19 pandemic has advanced creativity in doing RE, for example through changes in our communication, collaboration, co-creation, and tool use
  • Creativity techniques / methods / formats to identify and weigh conflicting ethical concerns in the context of RE
  • Creative use of techniques originally designed for other purposes, but now applied as RE techniques, and/or creativity enhancers, especially for requirements elicitation
  • The application of known creativity techniques in RE activities
  • Promoting stakeholder participation in RE activities through creativity techniques
  • Emerging ideas for new or adapted creativity techniques for RE activities
  • Creativity in online settings, using the creativity of the crowd
  • Gamification and creativity for RE
  • Using creativity techniques to measure and enhance user experience
  • Tool support for creativity enhancement
  • Context dependency of creativity and creativity techniques
  • Experiences with and considerations about creativity techniques in RE in industry
  • RE techniques that enable or support creativity

Important Dates

  • February 8, 2021: paper and interactive session proposal submission deadline
  • February 15, 2021: extended paper and interactive session proposal submission deadline
  • March 1, 2021: author notification
  • April 12, 2021: workshop collocated with REFSQ 2021 (virtual)

Paper Submission and Evaluation Criteria

We invite three types of submissions: position papers, full papers, and proposals for interactive sessions. Every type should treat a topic from the workshop themes.

  • Proposal for an interactive session (1–3 pages): Proposal for an interactive session such as a game, method demonstration, role playing, or mini-tutorial of 20–30 minutes which can be executed at the workshop, including the participation of up to 20 persons. The proposal should be designed to support physical, virtual and hybrid workshop settings.
  • Position paper (3–6 pages): Short paper, stating the position of the author(s) on any of the workshop topics. For example, a position paper could describe an experiment or a case study in industry. A position paper will be evaluated on its potential for generating discussion, on practical relevance and on the originality of the positions stated. A position paper can be used also to describe emerging ideas on how creativity should be performed, in which case it will be evaluated based on its relevance, originality and sound argumentation.
  • Full paper (8–10 pages): Full paper evaluating an experience (in industry) or describing the results of a research effort. A full paper will be evaluated for innovativeness of the proposed ideas and for technical soundness.

Each submission should be in the CEUR-ART style for one-column, available as LaTeX files, Overleaf template, and Word template. See http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-XXX/ for more information.

Submissions will be accepted via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=creare2021.

The papers will be published in the REFSQ workshop proceedings at CEUR.

Each submission will be reviewed by three members of the Program Committee.

Past Editions of the Workshop

Program Committee

  • Sebastian Adam, OSSENO Software GmbH, Germany
  • Raian Ali, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar
  • Carina Alves, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil
  • Dan Berry, University of Waterloo, Canada
  • Jennifer Horkoff, Chalmers | University of Gothenburg, Sweden
  • Meira Levy, Shenkar College, Israel
  • Luisa Mich, University of Trento, Italy
  • Anitha PC, QC Consulting Group, Bangalore India
  • Kurt Schneider, Leibniz University Hannover, Germany

Workshop Organizers

  • Andrea Herrmann, AKAD University, Germany
  • Eduard C. Groen, Fraunhofer IESE, Germany
  • Maya Daneva, University of Twente, the Netherlands
  • Patrick Mennig, Fraunhofer IESE, Germany
« Deadline Extended Call for Papers 2020 »