Facing the Challenges of Teaching Requirements Engineering

This paper reports on our experience of teaching Requirements Engineering for undergraduate students. It is well known, the obstacles educators have in teaching requirements engineering. These obstacles are related to the very nature of requirements engineering: a multidisciplinary field that deals with both computer science and social sciences concepts. Teaching requirements engineering just with problems descriptions, as a basis for the construction of requirements specifications or requirements models, misses the point. Educators should also provide students with ways of gathering client information. However, to be effective in this regard, there is the need that students interact with clients. Our pedagogical strategy is designed to tackle these challenges. Notwithstanding, we need to have feedback about the strategy, which lead to the design of an assessment to gauge the efficacy of our pedagogical strategy. We, describe the strategy, stress its novelty in facing the challenges, and provide assessment results over 3 semesters.