Innovation Workshop Documentation for Following Software Engineering Activities

Abstract

[Context & motivation] Requirements engineering (RE) can be seen as creative problem solving (CPS), overlapping with user experience (UX) and design activities. Creative processes, such as innovation workshops (IWs), are often facilitated group activities. They provide an understanding of challenges and user needs, leading to increased software quality. A large number of results from IWs needs to be documented in a suitable manner for later use, as not all results can be followed up upon immediately. [Question/problem] With current means of IW documentation, it is hard to extract the required information (e.g., photo minutes), or they are inefficient to produce or digest (e.g., audio and video recordings, textual documentation). Documentation of only the results leads to the loss of any discussions, decisions, reasons, and discarded alternatives, as these are usually not written down during an IW. The interpretation of the documentation depends on the viewer’s memory and understanding of the IW and the results, which is prone to misinterpretation and errors unless enriched with context information from the IW planning. [Principal ideas/results] We explored the limitations of IW documentation during a workshop with 29 experts from the usability and UX domain. Problems with using the results in later software engineering (SE), RE, and UX activities arise from misalignment between IW result documentation and activity requirements. The experts created a set of initial solution ideas, but no concrete solutions. [Contributions] We address the need for reasonable methods for documenting the results of IWs so that they can be used efficiently in later activities. The design and preliminary results of the expert workshop are presented. Furthermore, we discuss a research roadmap towards making targeted improvements to IW documentation by understanding subsequent activities.