Industry Projects in Requirements Engineering Education: Application in a University Course in the US and Comparison with Germany

Abstract

Project-based learning has proven useful in software engineering education to increase student engagement and learning performance. In this paper, we contribute our experiences from applying industry projects in an undergraduate requirements engineering course in the United States. We furthermore discuss our experiences from courses conducted in Germany and the US course in light of difference in the educational systems. Results show that our course design is well received in both countries in terms of learning outcomes, student motivation, teamwork, attention to detail, and performance in the exam.

Calibrated Peer Reviews in Requirements Engineering Instruction: Application and Experiences

“…Even early RE education research values summative learning approaches (i.e., learning that allows students to explore the problem space [7], [10]), for example through active student collaboration on projects (e.g., [28]). To this day, projectbased (see e.g., [20], [21], [22]) or collaboration-based (see e.g., [23], [28], [29]) instruction is among the favored approaches to instruct RE, either by involving games (e.g., [29]), stakeholders (e.g., [31]), role-playing (e.g., [6], [20]), or case studies (e.g., [5]).…”

“…To this end, education research favors the combined application of summative learning with formative learning (i.e., learning by remembering theory and concepts, see [7], [10]). Applied to RE, this means students ought to be exposed to theory, followed by formative assignments, and eventually summative projects (like in [29]).…”

“…In this section, we present the course design into which we integrated CPR for assignments. Although the course design was discussed in detail in [29], we present the key elements in the following to provide the reader with a self-contained description. We also place emphasis on aspects that correspond to formative and summative learning as it pertains to the application of CPR to foster comparability with the results from prior work.…”

“…The RE course was a key addition to the SE BS degree program to attain ABET 1 accreditation, which was awarded in Summer 2020. To meet accreditation requirements, several topics related to safety and security requirements were added over the design presented in [29], one of which was course work to analyze security risk and their mitigation by eliciting, documenting, and validating security requirements as well as their impact on system safety. Nevertheless, the key focus of the course was to instruct the principles of RE for safetycritical systems.…”

Introduction to the Minitrack on Measurement and Assessment

“…Marian Daun and Bastian Tenbergen follow up on their previous research on teaching requirements engineering to undergraduate students using industryrealistic case examples in [3]. Specifically, the authors improved a course design for graduate and undergraduate courses in Germany to an undergraduate setting in the US.…”