Creadtivity: um processo que integra design thinking e técnicas de criatividadade na elicitação de requisitos de software

IT solutions are becoming more and more part of people’s everyday life, and with that the demands on usefulness and usability have been growing continuously. The problems to be solved are increasingly complex, and traditional techniques used by software engineers to find opportunities and solve problems do not always manage to achieve their goals and, when they do, the result is not always a product that satisfies users and brings competitive advantage to the company. The truth is that IT products deeply depend on social life dynamics, which are primarily not the concern of engineering but of design. In this context, Design Thinking provides a methodology to elicit user needs, producing a series of quick and simple prototypes that eventually converge to innovative solutions. In addition, creativity techniques have a great capacity to generate new ideas, which can help in the requirements elicitation. To integrate the philosophy of design thinking with creativity techniques, thus uniting concepts of design with the exploitation of new ideas, a structured process was proposed. This paper describes this process, called Creadtivity, which integrates the Design Thinking methodology with creativity techniques for software requirements elicitation, in order to reach innovation. The aim is that this process can be used to expand the skills of IT teams to solve problems creatively. A first evaluation of the process was carried out by applying the process in a software development company and by using a questionnaire to collect data. A second evaluation was performed through an experiment for the use of the process by master's students and subsequent comparison of the prototypes generated, getting the opinion of stakeholders and experts in design. As a result of the two assessments, Creadtivity proved to be easy to be learned and used, systematic and possible to be integrated with other processes and techniques. In addition, the result of the comparison of the prototypes showed that the prototype generated by the team using Creadtivity has indication of innovation.