How Consistent Is Students´ Understanding of Requirements?

A constant thread in the software engineering educational community is that students must obtain experience with real systems in order to be prepared for the workplace. It is important to balance the use of real systems, which in some cases may be too large for complete student understanding, with the use of smaller, locally developed systems to achieve the same goals. Unfortunately, the requirements for real systems are almost never available. As a preliminary step towards the development of requirements for the student´s own new projects, we developed an exercise in a senior project capstone course to examine a preliminary set of requirements for a reasonably sized existing system. We found that student understanding of requirements for the existing system was mixed at best. However, we found that this initial experience evaluating an existing system´s requirements aided with the students´ process of developing their own requirements for a later project.