Downsizing EPMcreate to Lighter Creativity Techniques for Requirements Elicitation

EPMcreate is a creativity technique for requirements elicitation based on a 16-step process. These steps suggest focusing on requirements related to every combination of two different target users or viewpoints. A series of experiments confirmed its feasibility; its applicability, both as individual and group technique; and its greater effectiveness than brainstorming. However, analysts involved in some of the experiments highlighted the large number of steps as a limitation of the technique. Recent experiments tested a variant of the EPMcreate, named Power-Only EPMcreate, based on 4 of the 16 steps. The experiments showed that it works better than EPMcreate for at least website requirements. Nevertheless, the question of whether any other combination of the steps of the original technique could work is still open. This paper illustrates a number of criteria for generating lighter creativity techniques, each based on a subset of the 16 steps of EPMcreate.