Using business process models to foster competencies in requirements engineering

Requirements are of paramount importance for the quality of software systems. For various reasons, however, university students encounter difficulties in understanding the role of requirements and appropriately applying relevant methods to deal with requirements. This paper describes the concept for teaching requirements engineering that was devised at Coburg University of Applied Sciences. As a key idea, teaching requirements starts out from business process models. From these models, requirements for a workflow application can be derived and specified in a requirements document. A main benefit of this approach lies in the fact that requirements are not just presented as an abstract concept. Furthermore, students are exposed to the complexity of an almost realistic workflow application. Being more realistic than a toy project, the latter also improves understanding why requirements should be described precisely and provides opportunities to also exercise non-technical competencies that are important for successful requirements engineering.