SEREBRO is a web-based applicaton for software development with three objectives for encouraging and rewarding creativity: (a) build a graphical, asynchonously communicated, idea network to interconnect ideas and support creativity via a social networking platform, (b) tailor idea network usage to explicit phases of software development to encourage creativty toward project milestones, and (c) investigate mechanisms that assess the idea proliferation and propagation to reward creativity. The current implementation of SEREBRO, SEREBRO 1.0, is an idea generation tool that incorporates graphical and textual idea expression, idea connectivity, and agree/disagree capability, as shown in the figure below.

The main challenge behind recognizing and rewarding creativie contribution by team members in a Software Engineering project is to devise a framework that captures and relates ideas as they are generated while guidng the design process toward a project milestone as structured by the Rational Unified Process (RUP). The core notion of creative process we use is an idea. An idea can be a belief statement, a problem solving approach, a solution to a problem or a discussion related to any idea type. Idea-related activities include Brainstorming, Spinning, Pruning and Finalizing. Examples of these activities can be seen in the figure below.

Figure 1. The Software Engineering Disciplines in the Rational Unifed Process
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Video

Click here to view the video demonstration.
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The video can alternatively be downloaded here.

Publications

The SEREBRO Project: Fostering Creativity through Collaboration and Rewards, R. Gamble, S. Sen, et. al., Presented at EDUMas Workshop, part of 8th Int. Conf. on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2009), 2009.

Results [Data]

CS4503 Fall 2009 - Survey Results (PDF)

CS4503 Fall 2009 - Correlations (PDF)

View spreadsheet of all Survey Results, Expert Ratings and Correlations (MHT) (XLS)

CS4503 Challenge 4 - Team Level - Survey Results (PDF) (XLS)

CS4503 Challenge 5 - Team Level - Survey Results (PDF) (XLS)

Acknowledgement: This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0757434. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).