Teaching Motivational Models in Agile Requirements Engineering

Abstract

Software engineering courses continually strive to maintain an excellent teaching curriculum that provides students with the agile skills as per industry needs. A particular challenge of teaching requirements engineering is capturing and communicating software requirements without killing team agility with excessive documentation. In many projects, requirements can be ambiguous and inconsistent. It is important to find a middle ground between completely by-passing requirements documentation and writing a complete Software Requirements Specification. In this paper, we report our experiences, presenting a guideline for students and educators who wish to adopt motivational modelling, a lightweight approach to requirements elicitation and modelling, for agile requirements engineering. Motivational modelling is an efficient technique that also represents a good boundary object to support discussions between developers and non-technical clients. Finally, we outline discussion points regarding where motivational models could fit into other agile practices.

Causes and Mitigation Practices of Requirement Volatility in Agile Software Development

“…In addition, they emphasized the importance of expertise in requirements elicitation and software development. Furthermore, they claimed that training and education can enhance this expertise, which is particularly useful for effectively eliciting and documenting requirements, especially when working with non-technical clients [16]. Therefore, agile methodology facilitates rapid learning and adaptation [10].…”

Evaluating Engagement in Technology-Supported Social Interaction by People Living with Dementia in Residential Care

“…he main purpose of this technique is to generate a Motivational Model that presents a hierarchical structure of the goals for using the system [49]. Rather than a speciication of sotware requirements, a Motivational Model serves as a boundary object that allows knowledge to be shared among diferent stakeholders in a project [44,49]. he lexible nature of the models as a boundary object has allowed their use in multiple areas, including policy design [62], higher level education [44] and technology design [9,60].…”

“…Rather than a speciication of sotware requirements, a Motivational Model serves as a boundary object that allows knowledge to be shared among diferent stakeholders in a project [44,49]. he lexible nature of the models as a boundary object has allowed their use in multiple areas, including policy design [62], higher level education [44] and technology design [9,60]. Given that Motivational Models provide an overall description of the goals of a system and the relationships between the goals and people who are involved in the system, in this work we intend to use the models to describe, from a perspective that is grounded in the data, the goals of the use of the A Beter Visit app in the context of residential care.…”

“…he models are usually generated during the design phase of a project, and they display the focus that design should have during development. A Motivational Model is created by conducting a do/be/feel session as described by López-Lorca et al [44], which is a facilitated brainstorming session that creates, through group discussions, four lists known as the "do/be/feel lists": roles, functional goals, quality goals and emotional goals. hen, the functional goals are prioritised, and the qualities and emotions are linked to the functions of the system by adding them next to their related functional goal.…”

“…Based on literature from HCI, Gerontology and Public Health, we deine our approach to engagement in terms of (1) dyadic interactions with the interface by the person living with dementia and the facilitator of the technology, and (2) interactions Motivational Models incorporate roles that are associated to the diferent goals, which allows to include how diferent stakeholders relate to the designed system. he irst Motivational Model was built by using the do/be/feel elicitation method with the design team [44]; we aimed to understand the intended features and qualities of the app to foster engagement with people living with dementia. he second Motivational Model was built following a process that analysed the data using Grounded heory techniques [14] with sensitising concepts [4] from the irst Motivational Model, and organised the codes and themes using the do/be/feel structure.…”