Group Versus Individual Use of an Optimized and the Full EPMcreate as Creativity Enhancement Techniques for Web Site Requirements Elicitation

[Context] Creativity is often needed in requirements elicitation, ie, generating ideas for requirements, and therefore, techniques to enhance creativity are believed to be useful. [Objective] How does the size of a group using the EPMcreate creativity enhancement technique or an optimization of it, POEPM-create, affect the group’s and each member of the group’s effectiveness in generating requirement ideas? [Method] 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. [Results] The data of this experiment combined with the data of two previous experiments involving two-person and four-person groups using EPMcreate and POEPMcreate indicate that the size of a group using EPMcreate or POEPMcreate does affect the number of raw and new requirement ideas generated by the group and by the average member of the group. [Conclusions] A conclusion from the data is that generally, the larger a group is, up to a particular group size that depends on the creativity enhancement technique used, the more raw and new requirement ideas it generates. After that particular group size, the larger a group is, the fewer raw and new requirement ideas it generates. Another conclusion from the data is that generally, the larger a group is, up to a particular group size that depends on the creativity enhancement technique used, the more raw and new requirement ideas the average group member generates. After that particular group size, the larger a group is, the fewer raw and new requirement ideas he or she generates. These conclusion are partially corroborated by qualitative data gathered from a survey of professional business or requirements analysts about group sizes and creativity enhancement techniques.