Teaching EARS to Undergrads in the Pandemic - Industry Academia Experience

The COVID-19 pandemic is rampant in India and this has changed the way the students and teachers interact with each other during a course. An added complexity is the introduction of the Industry Academia participation in terms of Adjunct Faculties. Teaching formal methods to undergraduate students has been difficult and these are well captured in the academic community. The necessity of good requirements writing which can be validated using formal methods is a need of the hour for the industry. Requirements error contribute to 70% of the errors in safety critical projects. A course on Formal Methods is offered at the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal as an undergraduate elective. This has 54 students registered and the course is offered online by an adjunct faculty from the industry. The experiences of capturing and writing good requirements using the EARS (Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax) is highlighted in this paper. A survey of before and after the class and an exercise on EARS notations are brought out. The lessons learnt and the efficacy of the teaching is brought out as a three perspective: student, academia and industry.