Provoking creativity: imagine what your requirements could be like

Requirements engineering isn't recognized as a creative process. However, as new systems and products emerge, stakeholders are increasingly creating and inventing ideas that they express as requirements. Requirements engineering, with its focus on elicitation, analysis, and management, has yet to fully grasp this trend. We applied techniques to encourage creative thinking during the requirements process for a software-based system in a naturally conservative domain - air traffic management (ATM). We applied unusual theories, such as analogical reasoning from cognitive science, to underpin the use of these techniques, and we report basic results and lessons learned. We focus on the creativity techniques we applied (see the sidebar) and demonstrate them with examples from the ATM domain.