Requirements Engineering for the Ageing Population: a Teaching Perspective

Elders occupy an ample space among the potential end-users of the pieces of software we are designing. This situation is only increasing, and even the pessimistic projections forecast global ageing in the World population. In this context, it is our duty as software engineers to design and implement software adapted to elders. However, this particular problem is too often bypassed in the classical software engineering curriculums. In this paper, we report about a set of courses dedicated to requirements engineering for the ageing population, currently implemented at Universite Cote d'Azur (UCA, France) and Universite du Quebec a Montreal (UQAM, Canada). We identify challenges related to the ageing population that can be addressed in a course and report on how such courses are implemented in both institutions. The work reported in this paper is validated through an in-depth case study at UCA, based on 18 years of experience in the teaching of requirement engineering for specific populations.