An active/collaborative approach in teaching requirements engineering

Abstract

The requirements engineering (RE) course is a component of the curriculum for the Masters in Software Engineering (MSSE) program at Monmouth University. It has been the first software engineering program in New Jersey and one of the first in the nation. The RE course introduces students to the process, methods and tools specific to this area, and the corresponding software quality issues. The course is offered in a lecture and laboratory format. To reinforce the concepts learned, students actively participate in their learning as they play different roles for eliciting requirements, collaboratively improve the quality of their standard requirement documents or share their particular expertise with their teams when performing object-oriented analysis. This paper describes the current structure of the RE course and my experience related to the active/collaborative approaches in teaching it.