Teaching the Unknown and the Unknowable in Requirements Engineering Education

Abstract

A challenge in teaching students about the "realities" of requirements engineering (RE) in systems design involves managing requirements change and uncertainty, with all the associated unknowns and unknowable. This paper aims to inspire a discussion for why knowing the unknown and unknowable of RE is a critical design skill. We describe how we might go about fostering an attitude of acceptance versus resistance and fear of the unknown and unknowable in RE, and help develop an important skill in systems design students.The classroom experiences, successes and challenges are described, and suggestions offered for future work.

Using Extreme Characters to Teach Requirements Engineering

“…However, exposing students to such problems allows them to apply elicitation, analysis, specification, and validation techniques to non-trivial problems. This can be challenging given that solving real-world problems takes time, and any teaching needs to be completed within reasonable time and resource constraints [4]. Software engineering modules typically include some element of teamwork, which introduces students to non-technical issues associated with Requirements Engineering.…”

An Online Graduate Requirements Engineering Course

“…Various tools and techniques have been reported to address these and reduce the gap between education and practice. For example, Barnes, et al [10] discuss their use of Toulmin's model of logical argumentation to deal with unknown (incomplete or changing) requirements in their undergraduate RE course. Hoffmann [11] focuses on teaching human factors in RE courses using improvisational theatre techniques.…”

“…It has been noted that requirements are emergent [16] and arise from interactions between the requirements engineer and the customer. Role playing to represent stakeholders and the role reversal of developer/client increases interaction between students and promotes the requisite variety [10] in requirements elicitation. Damien et al [17] describe a graduate RE course where students from geographically distributed universities role-play the development of a requirements specification document.…”

Experiential learning approach for requirements engineering education

“…One such graduate course, Heuristic Problem Solving [27], was developed in 1970, and has been actively offered since its inception. A current course derived from Heuristic Problem Solving pedagogy with a special emphasis on the design and analysis of manufacturing systems is now in operation as a two-semester, senior, Capstone design class for industrial and systems engineering students [2]. More recently, there has been a growing interest in project based teaching [14] and more specifically Problem Based Learning approaches to Software Engineering [11,20].…”

“…Only a few publications, e.g. [2,9,10,19,34] report on other types of pedagogy used to teach RE. Teaching RE using games [3,24] seems to be a recent innovative trend.…”