Teaching Requirements Engineering An experimental approach

• Main Author: Asbjørn Danielsen
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Narvik; Narvik University College
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.399.6395; http://www.nik.no/2010/08-Danielsen.pdf

The software industries use of Requirements Engineering (RE) is obstructed by the industries relatively poor understanding of RE practices and benefits. Teaching RE at university level is in this context an important endeavor. This paper reports on an experimental approach on teaching RE and the results recorded during two years at Narvik University College. The course described in this paper uses experimental pedagogy to give the students experience in close to real-life work environment, demonstrating social and problem complexity of RE. The course uses social simulations rather than software simulations, making the students learn through interactions with real people and confronted with the complexity of social relationships. Students, participating in the course, where divided into two groups. The first group had no previous experience with software development or programming languages. The other group was familiar with both object orientation and programming.