Teaching requirements engineering through role playing: lessons learnt

Requirements engineering (RE) has attracted a great deal of attention from researchers and practitioners in recent years. This increasing interest demands academia to provide software engineering students with a solid foundation in the subject matter. RE is a multi disciplinary and communication rich activity in software development. The RE tools, methods and techniques to date have drawn upon a variety of disciplines, and the requirements engineers are increasingly expected to be well versed with these disciplines. In RE education, it is thus imperative to cover a wide range of topics and teach a variety of skills that one needs to know and acquire to be able to perform effective requirements engineering. We argue that in teaching RE, we must cover three fundamental topics: the traditional analysis and modelling skills, interviewing and groupware skills for requirements elicitation, and writing skills for specifying requirements. We report on our experiences gained in teaching such a requirements engineering subject for the first time to students at University of Technology, Sydney. We used role playing as a pedagogical tool to give students a greater appreciation of the range of issues and problems associated with requirements engineering in real settings. We believe that the lessons learnt from this exercise will be valuable for those interested in advancing requirements engineering education and training.