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Involving Customers in Requirements Engineering Education: Mind the Goals!

Published: 14 June 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Good requirements are an essential prerequisite for successful IT projects. Consequently, IT students should already be exposed to requirements-related intricacies at universities. Some authors argue that requirements engineering education should include an external customer for making things more tangible and realistic. In this paper, we present and analyze two learning settings involving such a customer that we used at our universities for several years.
The main contribution of this paper lies in identifying significant differences in how customers may be involved in requirements engineering education. Although the two settings look quite similar at first sight, a detailed analysis reveals important differences that are rooted in different intended learning outcomes. Consequently, there is no single "ideal" setting, not even for involving a customer in requirements engineering education, which stands out against the others. Besides, no such setting may be used as a best practice right away without paying crucial attention to the context and, in particular, the underlying intended learning outcomes.

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Cited By

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  • (2022)A systematic literature review of requirements engineering educationRequirements Engineering10.1007/s00766-022-00381-928:2(145-175)Online publication date: 19-May-2022
  • (2021)A Survey of Instructional Approaches in the Requirements Engineering Education Literature2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)10.1109/RE51729.2021.00030(257-268)Online publication date: Sep-2021

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ECSEE '18: Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference of Software Engineering Education
June 2018
140 pages
ISBN:9781450363839
DOI:10.1145/3209087
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 14 June 2018

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Author Tags

  1. Best Practice
  2. Customer involvement
  3. Goals
  4. Higher education
  5. Intended learning outcomes
  6. Requirements engineering

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  • Refereed limited

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ECSEE'18

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Overall Acceptance Rate 11 of 16 submissions, 69%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2022)A systematic literature review of requirements engineering educationRequirements Engineering10.1007/s00766-022-00381-928:2(145-175)Online publication date: 19-May-2022
  • (2021)A Survey of Instructional Approaches in the Requirements Engineering Education Literature2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)10.1109/RE51729.2021.00030(257-268)Online publication date: Sep-2021

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