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

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.