Towards a Requirements Engineering Process for Innovative Software: Learning with the ConecteIdeias Case.

TL;DR: This paper aims at presenting the RE process which led to the development of a web-based social network named ConecteIdeias, aimed at supporting people on creating new ideas and solutions to change social reality in the place where they live.

Abstract: For many years, Requirements Engineering has been regarded as a crucial phase of software development, because it is responsible to collect from the stakeholders and model the purposes of the system to be. Consequently, lots of research results have been accumulated over the years concerning approaches to elicit and model requirements. However, eliciting and modeling requirements for innovative software, for which no determined stakeholder is defined, are still open research issues. This is due to the very nature of innovation, which asks for new ways of thinking and generating software products. This paper aims at presenting the RE process which led to the development of a web-based social network named ConecteIdeias. This social network is aimed at supporting people on creating new ideas and solutions to change social reality in the place where they live. Besides briefly presenting the social network and thoroughly describing the process, this paper also presents some lessons learned and good practices gathered throughout the process execution. The long term goal of this research is to propose a general RE process for the development of innovative software.