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Experiential learning approach for requirements engineering education

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Abstract

The use of requirements engineering (RE) in industry is hampered by a poor understanding of its practices and their benefits. Teaching RE at the university level is therefore an important endeavor. Shortly before students become engineers and enter the workforce, this education could ideally be provided as an integrated part of developing the requisite business skills for understanding RE. Because much social wisdom is packed into RE methods, it is unrealistic to expect students with little organizational experience to understand and appreciate this body of knowledge; hence, the necessity of an experiential approach. The course described in this paper uses an active, affective, experiential pedagogy giving students the opportunity to experience a simulated work environment that demonstrates the social/design–problem complexities and richness of a development organization in the throes of creating a new product. Emotional and technical debriefing is conducted after each meaningful experience so that students and faculty, alike can better understand the professional relevancies of what they have just experienced. This includes an examination of the many forces encountered in industrial settings but not normally discussed in academic settings. The course uses a low-tech social simulation, rather than software simulation, so that students learn through interaction with real people, and are therefore confronted with the complexity of true social relationships.

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Notes

  1. Table 1 is the result of anecdotal observations of Gause [10] and the informal discussion of these observations with senior management and technical people drawn from many industries. These observations are consistent with the modified ABET 2000 standards and very recent findings of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Engineers (see [25]).

  2. Original version in French: Vous avez rendu le cours intéressant. J’ai beaucoup aimé les interventions d’A. Wegmann concernant le supply chain de [..]. Les expériences professionnelles sont toujours intéressantes.

  3. Original version in French: Plutôt que de baser le cours sur une simulation d’erp faite en weblang, pourquoi ne pas utiliser un vrai erp [..]. Pourquoi ne pas présenter SAP? Celà fait partie de la culture générale: beaucoup d’entre-nous seront une fois ou l’autre confrontés à un ERP.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer and Communication Sciences, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Gil Regev & Alain Wegmann

  2. State University of New York at Binghamton, New York, USA

    Donald C. Gause

  3. Savile Row, LLC, New York, USA

    Donald C. Gause

Authors
  1. Gil Regev
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  2. Donald C. Gause
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  3. Alain Wegmann
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gil Regev.

Appendix: Course evaluation

Appendix: Course evaluation

The short questionnaire is shown in Fig. 5. The scores on question 1 were, 10, 8, 7, 5, 8, 10, and 4. The last score was given by a student who admitted to not participating actively enough in the course because he was working during class hours.

Fig. 5
figure 5

Graduate questionnaire

Full size image

Following are the seven answers we received to questions 2 and 3:

Question 2: What did you like about the course?

  • The practice side

  • It made us think about the “project” in a whole and not only in an engineering point of view, the question on what would the business angel like to hear, etc. I would say maybe practice in general. And the content itself obviously!

  • The different workshops when the professor and assistants play the role of somebody and we have to ask them questions.

  • The class was different that typical EPFL classes and we learned many very interesting things and we were able to see how they work in practice. This was a great combination.

  • The training to obtain information about people working in the enterprise (role game). See a complete modeling process. People coming from other universities/enterprises → application to reality.

  • You have made the course really interesting. I really liked the professor’s discussions about the […] supply chain. Professional experiences are always interesting.Footnote 2

  • It was very interactive. Professor and TAs did a great job in creating scenarios that are most similar to the ones we could expect in reality. That gave us the opportunity to act under many constraints (making decisions under pressure, dealing with disagreements in the team, time deadlines, etc.). It was useful because later we discussed about our actions and made conclusions together about what we did good and what could have been done better and how.

Question 3: What would you like to see improved?

  • Improve documentation, more precise

  • When the class will be more organized I believe it will be possible to deepen the aspects. If my memory is good, I found sometimes lack of fluency between some aspects/chapters.

  • The explanations about the board. We first did not understand why it was useful and begin to use it really at the end of the game.

  • Sometimes I felt lost—our group did not know what exactly we were supposed to do and how to deliver the results. We were doing things for the first time so we had plenty of questions and we felt that there were not enough assistants, even though they were working all their time. A good way to organizing it would be creation of secure group website (for example use my.epfl.ch) where assistants would post the tasks to do, some description for those who have questions and templates of documents to organize the work (or link to a page with all this for each class). This would also facilitate working within a group: once we are obliged to put the documents there, the entire group can access them later for a reference, revisions for the exams etc. This is just an idea of improvement. In general, the class is very good and we learned a lot—this is a way to make it easier to follow for further students.

  • Slides were not very explicit, I have been ill a day and could not come and it was very difficult to get the course through the slides.

  • Rather than base the course on a simulated ERP why not use a real ERP? Why not present SAP? This is part of the common knowledge [in IT]. Many of us will be exposed one day to an ERP.Footnote 3

  • No particular suggestions.

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Regev, G., Gause, D.C. & Wegmann, A. Experiential learning approach for requirements engineering education. Requirements Eng 14, 269–287 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-009-0084-x

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