Martin Mahaux

Massively distributed authorship of academic papers

Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially increase productivity. This paper presents a model of massively distributed collaborative authorship of academic papers. This model, developed by a collective of thirty authors, identifies key tools and techniques that would be necessary or useful to the writing process. The process of collaboratively writing this paper was used to discover, negotiate, and document issues in massively authored scholarship. Our work provides the first extensive discussion of the experiential aspects of large-scale collaborative research.

Theater Improvisers Know the Requirements Game

This article introduces improvisational theater, or improv, to support team-based innovation in requirements processes. It proposes improv to help workshop participants develop requirements soft skills through practice and play. The authors describe and demonstrate different improv techniques with simple examples, then advise readers on how to introduce them into requirements projects.

Collaborative creativity in requirements engineering: Analysis and practical advice

Requirements engineering (RE) often entails interdisciplinary groups of people working together to find novel and valuable solutions to a complex design problem. In such situations RE requires creativity in a form where interactions among stakeholders are particularly important: collaborative creativity. However, few studies have explicitly concentrated on understanding collaborative creativity in RE, resulting in limited advice for practitioners on how to support this aspect of RE. This paper provides a framework of factors characterising collaborative creative processes in RE. These factors enable a systematic investigation of the collaboratively creative nature of RE. They can potentially guide practitioners when facilitating RE efforts, and also provide researchers with ideas on where to focus when developing methods and tools for RE.

Making It all Up: Getting in on the Act to Improvise Creative Requirements

This mini-tutorial proposes participants a fun and refreshing learning moment. Through actually playing improvisational theatre games in groups themselves, participants will be given the chance to feel what it takes to innovate in teams, and will learn new ways to generate creative ideas when eliciting requirements.

A new paradigm for applied requirements engineering research

This position paper reflects on recent work that sought to make positive changes to the IEEE Requirements Engineering conference (RE), and on twenty years of requirements engineering (REng) research. We question the values that seem to underpin RE, and offer what we believe are more appropriate values. We argue that these new values would result in better alignment between research and the needs of industry. Further, the new values would encourage more rewarding work for researchers, and would lead to a better RE conference. We summarise the value shift in a draft manifesto for applied research in REng. To illustrate the potential for concrete changes, we suggest one possible wiki-based model for REng research that could deliver these new values.

Participation and Open Innovation for Sustainable Software Engineering

This chapter explores the reasons why the innovation processes, in particular in software engineering, become more and more open and participative; and the implications on the sustainability of future software-intensive systems. The chapter then goes deeper in understanding participation, and the collaborative creativity processes that lie behind it, towards an understanding of the conditions under which participation may lead to more sustainability. The case of open source software is analysed as an illustration and finally suggests novel participative and requirements-oriented techniques to support the design of sustainable systems.

A framework for understanding collaborative creativity in requirements engineering: Empirical validation

Requirements engineering (RE) often needs creativity in a form where interactions among stakeholders are particularly important: collaborative creativity. However, few studies have explicitly concentrated on understanding collaborative creativity in RE, resulting in a lack of well-founded advice for practitioners on how to support this aspect of RE. Through an online survey, this paper seeks empirical validation for a framework of factors characterising collaborative creative processes in RE. Within the limits of the validity of the study, the results show support for the utility of the framework: collaborative creativity seems to be a linear function of the mean score to all factors in the framework. Factors can be grouped, and the specific impact of each group on collaboration, value and novelty can be assessed.

Creative collisions: Meet and create: And other “RE interactive” suggestions

The International IEEE Requirements Engineering conference (RE) is the premier international forum for requirements engineering. However, participant interaction mechanisms have not received significant recent attention and conference attendees have suggested that interaction support could be improved. The “RE Interactive” program is a first implementation step to increase the level and quality of interaction at RE. We present here a brief background to the initiative, describe in greater detail those initiatives being introduced this year and summarize possible initiatives for future years. We describe in greater detail the focal “RE Interactive” session: Creative Collisions. This session aims to explore the power of combinatorial creativity to create unexpected ideas for the RE community by promoting creative engagements between individuals, focusing on forging new relationships within the community.