A trainer's guideline to teaching soft skills using improvisation theater: a workshop format exemplified on a requirements engineering game

Abstract

Besides, knowing their methods and tools, (software) engineers need to be competent in soft skills such as communication, empathy and self-awareness. As of today, most trainings focus on teaching methods and tools, where the soft skills are left to be trained by some pedagogical training that itself often focus on the introduction of methods as well, but does not apply soft skills to the actual setting in which they will occur in normal day life. This pattern introduces a guideline for a training format as a solution to train soft skills in the participants' specific setup. The introduced format is flexible in that way, that its execution can be adjusted to specific backgrounds by using the storytelling approach.