Developing a creative idea generation system for innovative software reliability research

Reliability is one of the important aspects of any software, which has been studied for decades with many techniques proposed and developed. In software engineering, software reliability cannot be ignored in any application. However, it is still hard to measure and difficult to ensure the reliability of software, which means that it is necessary to find new ways to study on the software reliability, especially for researchers. Naturally, idea generation has to be involved in the process of getting innovative ideas. Although a considerable number of applications and research studies have been made in the past years in order to increase the effectiveness of idea making process, it is lack of efforts working on creativity in the idea generation process particularly. Moreover, creative computing is suitable to be employed to enhance the innovation of research studies on the software reliability, as it emphasises being creative in the whole software lifecycle. Therefore, the objective of this research paper is to propose an idea generation process to inspire new studies on software reliability. This paper first represents an idea generation framework. Then, after critically reviewed the creativity features and attributes, three creativity elements are proposed with corresponding sub-dimensions to support on balancing new and value of the ideas. Formal algorithms are designed to calculate and incorporate the creativity elements and their sub-dimension. Furthermore, a prototype of the proposed idea generation system is developed that is named as Research Topics Generation System (RTGS), in which a set of new research topics on software reliability are generated to inspire further studies, whilst creative computing ontology is created as the basis of the idea generation