Multidisciplinary and active/collaborative approaches in teaching requirements engineering

Abstract

The requirements engineering course is a core component of the curriculum for the Master's in Software Engineering programme, at Monmouth University (MU). It covers the process, methods and tools specific to this area, together with the corresponding software quality issues. The need to produce software engineers with strong teamwork and communication skills, capable of working in multidisciplinary teams, has been stressed repeatedly by industry world-wide. This paper reports on the multidisciplinary and active/collaborative approaches used in teaching requirements engineering at MU. To reinforce the concepts learned, students actively participate in their learning as they play different roles for eliciting requirements, or share their particular expertise with their teams when performing object-oriented analysis. The multidisciplinary experiment brought together software engineering and business management students. They collaborated to produce a software requirements specification for managerial processes involved in hiring and performance evaluation of employees within a firm. A description of the synchronization of the lectures with project deliverables in the two courses, different types of communication needed by students, positive interdependence of the teams across disciplines, and how they contributed to the success of the project will be discussed among other multidisciplinary issues encountered during this experiment.