Requirements engineering education for senior engineers: Course design and its evaluation

Abstract

Offshore development has become common for software companies. Such companies have started to concentrate their engineers' efforts on the early software development phase. Within this context, it is important to educate senior engineers to master all aspects of requirements engineering (RE). Though it is not easy to master the various aspects of RE all at once, we can expect engineers to study methods on their own if they believe that learning these methods is important for them or for their projects. We have developed a two-anda- half-day role-playing workshop for engineers that focuses on teaching the importance of RE, the background, rationale, and purpose of the requirements, as well as the actual requirements. The target students of our course are senior engineers with over ten years experience in software development. We first give an overview of RE techniques, and then, introduce the instructional design of our course for senior engineers. We also present the results of an actual workshop, which showed that engineers could learn worldviews of clients' requirements and the importance of the “why” of requirements.