Panel: Integrating Requirements Engineering Education into Core Engineering Disciplines

Abstract

Requirements engineering (RE) provides a set of techniques and tools to, ‘EASV’ (elicit, analyze, specify, and validate) the capabilities a product must have in order to meet user needs, solve definite user problems and deliver expected values to users. RE courses are usually designed to focus on software and computer hardware products, and are thus taught in software engineering (SE), information systems (IS) and computer science (CS). But RE tools and techniques are also intrinsically applicable and essential to other engineering disciplines, since those disciplines also develop and deploy products. For instance, products can be a motor control center (MCC) developed by electric engineers or aircraft engines developed by mechanical engineers. Successful development of any of these products requires techniques to precisely ESAV user needs and capabilities required to satisfy those needs. Therefore RE should be an essential component of engineering curriculum. This panel aims to bring together faculty and practitioners from engineering and computer science disciplines to identify and discuss challenges, benefits, and strategies for integrating RE course into engineering curriculum.