REET 2012 – Proceedings

Foreword
The Seventh International Workshop on Requirements Engineering Education and Training (REET 2012) continues the discussion among professionals and students, academics, industrial personnel, and consultants, about how best to prepare students and practitioners to effectively engage in the activities that comprise Requirements Engineering. Given the breadth of industrial disciplines where RE is relevant, how are academic institutions addressing questions of curriculum and evaluation? Within industry, how might RE education and training be offered to practitioners who may be quite proficient in their primary disciplines but find themselves less confident when they must specify requirements for a project or product? In addition to topics related to curriculum development, innovative contributions related to pedagogical techniques for teaching RE skills are demonstrated and discussed. REET 2012 aims to bring together researchers and practitioners with diverse interests and backgrounds in Requirements Engineering. We offer an engaging day of presentations and discussion, and actively elicit participation in participants’ examples of pedagogical practices in their own institutions or workplaces. We continue to build a community and provide resources to those working to moving the discipline forward through the education and training of those who engage in Requirements Engineering, or who are pursuing studies to prepare them for a fruitful industrial career.

Requirements Engineering Education and Training

Case-Based Stories for Traceability Education and Training
Orlena C. Z. Gotel and Stephen J. Morris
(City University London, UK)
The purpose of this paper is to disseminate knowledge about proven techniques relevant to software and systems engineering, and in particular to requirements traceability, but derived from another industry and another professional approach. It describes the process of investigating and dealing with an outbreak of a foodborne disease, an established process that depends upon traceability practice at multiple levels and its alignment within two distinct disciplines. We tell a story based upon an outbreak investigation case study to step through the details of this process and to discuss parallels for the practice of traceability in the context of identifying and addressing requirements-borne problems. Not only is this process a model of industrial practice in these other two disciplines, the provision of case study materials based upon past events is also a model industrial practice that makes the details of the process widely accessible for education and training. This paper seeks to encourage the similar use of case studies in requirements engineering education and training, to develop realistically grounded stories that can be used to step through the investigation of a requirements-borne problem, and so to demonstrate and discuss the practice and value of requirements traceability at each step.

Using RE Knowledge to Assist Automatically during Requirement Specification
Thorsten Merten, Thorsten Schäfer, and Simone Bürsner
(Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, Germany)
In a two semester software engineering (SE) course at Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University students have the opportunity to actually elicit, analyze and document requirements as well as design and develop a correspondent software product in teams of approximately four. The students have to use an issue tracking software in combination with a Requirements Engineering (RE) tool to document and plan their work. Though the course starts with RE theory from elicitation via documentation and traceability, we found that the students find it difficult to combine different RE artifact types and to develop useful traces between them. In this paper we present an approach to provide feedback and give pro-active advice inside an RE tool, while the specification is created. To derive this feedback we use a knowledge base containing rules and best practices to create a requirements specification. An assistance system applies these rules to guide the user in different situations, beginning with an empty specification up to the implementation of various RE artifact types and traces between them. This paper presents the status of our knowledge-based feedback mechanism and possible extensions. In order to get primary indicators for the value of this approach we did experiments and workshops with eight students who worked with the same tool with and without the feedback system.

REET 2012 – Proceedings

Seventh IEEE International Workshop on Requirements Engineering Education and Training (REET)

Requirements Engineering Education and Training