Using extreme characters to teach requirements engineering.

Iacob, Claudia; Faily, Shamal

Abstract

One of the main challenges in teaching Software Engineering as an undergraduate course is making the need for software processes and documentation obvious. Armed with some knowledge of programming, students may feel inclined to skip any development phase not involving coding. This is most pronounced when dealing with the Requirements Engineering practices. In this paper, we describe a practical approach to teaching Requirements Engineering using Extreme Characters. The exercise aimed to achieve the following learning objectives: a) understanding the need of including the end user in any requirements analysis phase, b) identifying the requirements engineering phase as a iterative process, c) understanding the necessity of constantly double checking the analyst's interpretation of the user requirements, d) ensuring the rigorous documentation of both user and system requirements, and e) identifying the place of requirements engineering in the overall development process, and the forces and challenges around this phase of development.

Citation

IACOB, C. and FAILY, S. 2017. Using extreme characters to teach requirements engineering. In Washizaki, H. and Mead, N. (eds.) Proceedings of the 30th IEEE conference on software engineering education and training (CSEET 2017), 7-9 November 2017, Savannah, USA. Los Alamitos: IEEE Computer Society [online], pages 107-111. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1109/CSEET.2017.25

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 30th IEEE conference on software engineering education and training (CSEET 2017)
• Start Date: Nov 7, 2017
• End Date: Nov 9, 2017
• Acceptance Date: Aug 25, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Dec 7, 2017
• Publication Date: Dec 31, 2017
• Deposit Date: Sep 19, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 16, 2021
• Publisher: IEEE Computer Society
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 107-111
• Series Title: Proceedings of the IEEE conferences on software engineering education and training (CSEET)
• Series ISSN: 2377-570X
• ISBN: 9781538625378
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/CSEET.2017.25
• Keywords: Computing education; Software engineering education; Requirements engineering; User-centred design; User personas; Computing students; Undergraduate students
• Public URL: https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/1437900