ICSE 2022. JF 47

1. How templated requirements specifications
inhibit creativity in software engineering
Rahul Mohanani, Paul Ralph, Burak Turhan and Vladimir Mandic.
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2021

2. Motivation
Involves
• Eliciting
• Modeling
• Analyzing
• Communicating
• Agreeing
• Evolving
Produces
• Unambiguous
• Consistent
• Traceable
• Verifiable
• Complete
• Feasible
….requirements
specifications
Major RE Practices:
• Goal - Oriented RE
• Scenario - Based RE
• User - Centered RE
• Non - Functional
Requirements
• Requirements
Prioritization
…. and many more.
Requirements Engineering

3. Designing A Health Fitness Mobile Application

4. A Possible Explanation….
Can be explained by
COGNITIVE BIAS
Bogus Requirements
Developers blindly accept
the given requirements
Failure in noticing
ambiguous and conflicting
requirements

5. Cognitive biases
Cognitive biases are systematic deviations from optimal reasoning.

6. Creativity
Why creativity matters?

7. Previous experiments

8. Experiments
O
R
I
G
P
R
A
C
List of
Requirements
List of Ideas
List of Prioritized
Requirements

9. Findings
Increase in
specification
formality reduced
design creativity

10. The current study
The experiments were not suitable to understand the cognitive mechanisms underlying the causal effects.
We needed real-time insight into designers’ cognitive processes.
Research Question
How do fixation and critical thinking explain reduction in design creativity when specifications are
presented as templated requirement specification.

11. The current study
Major Constructs
1. Fixation:
A cognitive bias which explains the tendency of the designers to pay excessive attention to a
given problem by readily converging on an available or known solution.
2. Critical Thinking:
Disciplined thinking that is clear, rational, open-minded and informed by evidence.
3. Templated Requirements Specifications:
Requirements specification written in a specific syntactic structure using a restricted (controlled)
natural language, in this case, for example, “The system shall facilitate diet planning”

12. Research methodology
We conducted a dialogue based verbal protocol analysis - in which participants verbalize thought
sequences in pairs.
Participation and Pairing
• A convenience sample of 18 professional software developers and 24 postgraduate students.
• None of the participants had any experience related to the given task.
• Participants were paired based on availability.

13. Research methodology
Study Execution

14. Research methodology
Data Analysis
1. Process coding
• The dialogues were coded line by line, where each assigned label reflected the action contained in the
dialogues.
• All labels that conveyed a particular process were combined to form themes.
• The saturation was achieved by the 14th transcript.
2. Closed coding
• We compared instances of ‘fixation’ against the instances of ‘critical thinking’.
• Here, fixation refers to instances where participants - (1) Accepted the task without any reflection, (2)
Adopt properties of known example without any discussion, or (3) Reject any new ideas without
reflection.
• If participants question something, but then accepted it, or rejected it, we label it as critical thinking.

15. Findings
Process Coding
Process coding produced 7 themes, each of which were interpreted as a distinct cognitive activity.
• Making Design Moves
• Uncritically Accepting
• Rejecting
• Grouping
• Questioning
• Assuming
• Considering quality Criteria
Closed Coding
We identified 1006 instances of fixation, compared to 298 instances of critical thinking.

16. Findings
Differences between Students and Professionals
• Professionals had more instances of both fixation and critical thinking than students.
• Both professionals and students seem equally susceptible to fixation.
• More experienced developers were more prone to fixation.

17. Conclusion
The results suggest that TRS inhibit creativity because designers fixate on specifications presented
restrictively, well structured and in constrained language, hindering critical thinking.
The three main contributions:
1. The paper advances a theory that explains the relationship between requirements and design
creativity.
2.The paper elaborates the concept of requirement fixation - A situation where designers’ pre-occupation
to satisfy all the requirements inhibits their creative potential.
3. The paper presents a simple taxonomy of software design actions.

18. THANK YOU!
Any Questions?