Understanding general concepts of requirements engineering through design thinking: An experimental study with students

Abstract

Teaching requirements engineering (RE) is one of the challenging parts of any software engineering (SE) education curriculum because it deals with understanding the problem from multiple perspectives and acquiring a holistic view of the system. Academicians have adopted several innovative approaches to teaching RE concepts to students, and design thinking (DT) is one of them. DT integrates the needs of people, technology, and requirements and can help learn and apply human‐centered techniques to solve problems. An experimental study is conducted with 315 undergraduate students to realize how they can learn the RE process effectively by combining DT methods with the RE concepts for an effective RE education. This study intends to identify how this integration help students in using multiple elicitation methods, better visualization and understanding of the system requirements, and achieving various teaching objectives. An experimental study was planned and executed with students by integrating DT methods for RE activities from the beginning of problem definition to the final solution. The evaluation was done by collecting students' responses to pre‐survey and post‐survey questions capturing the students' perspectives on the RE and DT techniques. The students' responses suggested that the DT drive RE activities to improve their learning, thinking abilities, engagement with the team, and teamwork. Additionally, the students' artifacts during the DT process have also been evaluated. The use of DT methods helped in understanding the elicitation process and, consequently, helped reach the solution.

Enhancing design thinking in engineering students with project‐based learning

“…DT education can help students learn and apply human-centered techniques to solve engineering problems [23]. Saurabh et al [32] conducted an experimental study of undergraduate students to explore the effective use of DT for learning the course "Requirements Engineering. "…”

“…PBL is divided into five parts: analyzing problems, formulating plans, exploring practice, communicating and sharing, and feedback evaluation [13]. PBL integrated with DT was applied in some educational courses to improve student creativity and innovation [17,32]. In Ref [17], PBL and DT were applied to a robotics course, and their effect on the learning motivation and creativity of students was analyzed.…”

“…To date, there have been few studies addressing DT education to facilitate the acquisition of knowledge related to DT skill and design practice [2,12,22,23,32], especially in specialized educational courses for engineering students. There has been little research on how to apply project-based teaching to develop DT in higher education courses to enhance student creativity and innovation.…”

“…Dym et al reported that good student DT capabilities can be obtained through the PBL teaching mode [9]. Saurabh et al [32] conducted an experimental study of undergraduate students to understand how they can effectively learn the process of requirements engineering using the DT method. Research on curriculum design based on DT. Curriculum design research based on DT designs and develops a curriculum with DT as the main teaching goal.…”

“…Dym et al reported that good student DT capabilities can be obtained through the PBL teaching mode [9]. Saurabh et al [32] conducted an experimental study of undergraduate students to understand how they can effectively learn the process of requirements engineering using the DT method.…”