Former Students’ Views on the Usefulness of Conceptual Modeling Education

Abstract

Abstract. A big challenge for education and research in Requirements Engineering and Conceptual Modeling (RE/CM) is the need for much more empirical research about the use in practice of RE/CM, including the practical impact of CM education. Former students of RE/CM are potential prescriptors of the RE/CM concepts, methodologies and tools that they have learnt, but they are also conditioned by the current use of those same issues in practice. In this paper we focus on the views that former students of a RE/CM course have, now as young professionals, on the usefulness of the received CM education. We have surveyed over 70 former students to know their opinions on the usefulness of the education on a representative set of CM artifacts. Our results show that our former students find quite useful in general their received CM education, with different usefulness degrees for the various learned artifacts.

A systematic literature review of requirements engineering education

“…Perhaps this is because student evaluations, assignment sheets, and exams are the typical means of assessment of student performance; however, another way of assessing learning outcomes is to measure student performance against industry needs, such as through a graduate alumni surveys of preparedness. This was done in [184], where researchers found that perceived usefulness of instructed documentation In summary, we consider it a positive development that educational approaches have taken a keen focus on improving students' industry-readiness and are moving away from rote memorization in favor of formative learning. However, many of these approaches aim at doing so without consideration of industry needs.…”

“…12). Most of these studies occurred before 2012 (i.e., when Ouhbi et al concluded) with the exception of [17,66,87,117,125,184] and [190]. Ouhbi et al were correct to point out that more instructional focus was required, as these 29 studies made up a mere 19.1% of all our selected studies (compared to 18.4% for "elicitation" alone).…”

“…5.1) that most approaches advocating industry-readiness do so in a project-based setting, requiring students to experience the whole RE process, from elicitation to documentation, to management. However, only ten of 73 studies mention a specific RE activity in an industry-realistic setting as opposed to targeting the whole RE process or not mentioning RE activities at all (i.e., [28,32,48,50,100,106,126,128,180,184]).…”

Mutation Operators for UML Class Diagrams

“…These CS represent three kinds of systems: (i) the Super Stationery system (SS), which makes use of classes with attributes and derived attributes, associations and constraints but has no generalizations, (ii) an Expense Report management system (ER) that uses fewer classes and relations but more constraints, and lastly, (iii) the Sudoku Game (SG) system [20], which is more variant-rich than the other two CS including generalization relations, derived associations and aggregations. The size of each CSUT is shown in Table 2 in terms of model elements.…”