Requirements compliance as a measure of project success

Students of software engineering need a mental model to guide their activities; this mental model should contain a concept of success. They should be able to contribute to that success criterion through their daily work. Although economic gain is a wide-spread measure of success, it cannot be fully controlled by developers or even project leaders. Inappropriate deadlines, political influences, and many other aspects are beyond the control of software engineers. A success criterion closer to the sphere of influence of software engineers could better guide decisions of students - and practicing software engineers as well. We introduce the concept of requirements compliance1, which measures the size of the intersection between stated and implemented requirements. Fulfilled requirements are considered a success. Both unfulfilled requirements and unsolicited features are considered indications of reduced success: The latter consume resources without meeting stated needs, while missing requirements ignore customer requests. In this paper, we motivate and introduce the core concept of requirements compliance. We show how it can be and has been used for different variants of software engineering education, including serious educational games. We go beyond this prior use by identifying ways of modeling, observing and controlling requirements compliance in a series of student projects. We discuss opportunities for using this concept in software engineering education - but also build on the mental model in research and in practice.