Experiences of embedding training in a basic requirements engineering method

Failures in software projects are a well-known fact. One of the most obvious solutions to the problem is hiring more skilled people for the job but skilled personnel is not readily available. An alternative solution to the problem is to focus on improving the capabilities of the available personnel. A ready-to-use method was constructed to ease the introduction of basic requirements engineering (RE) practices in industry. One of the central goals for the method was to embed training and support for learning by doing in it. Consequently, an overall strategy to do RE and a bottom-up implementation of it are suggested. The experiences from testing the constructed method in practice indicate that practitioners want to learn besides the daily work, and that the ready-to-use method helped to improve the RE practices and increase the understanding of RE in the participating companies.