Teaching requirements engineering with virtual stakeholders without software engineering knowledge

Teaching requirements engineering (RE) is a difficult endeavor since it must reflect the reality as close as possible. Also, a sense of risk for the students should be included, while the supervisors need to be in control all the time. Related literature agrees on the importance of stakeholders for RE education. While different potential groups of people were considered as stakeholders already, we propose a novel approach of using students of non-software engineering disciplines to introduce a semantic gap between software engineering students and these virtual stakeholders. In this paper, we describe our results and experiences in embedding RE education within a software engineering lecture for undergraduate students. Also, we report on our efforts in setting up and conducting requirements engineering sessions with virtual stakeholders without software engineering knowledge.