Why should I help you to teach requirements engineering?

Abstract

To teach requirements engineering skills to students it is important for them to experience stakeholder interactions in a realistic setting. Only then they learn to appreciate the effort it takes to elicit, document, and validate requirements. For a realistic course design, all stakeholders the students interact with need to be real, thus, they need to have a stake in the software system being specified. In this paper, we discuss plausible motivations of real stakeholders. As long as stakeholders benefit in a way that suits them, they are readily available to get involved, even with students just learning how to capture requirements. Also, we discuss two ongoing case studies of involving real stakeholders in a requirements engineering course. While these setups do not scale well, they provide the students an authentic situation which cannot be reproduced with virtual stakeholders.