Gameplay to Introduce and Reinforce Requirements Engineering Practices

This paper reports on the design and use of a board game to introduce students and organizations to Requirements Engineering (RE) good practices. Our position is that the awareness and adoption of RE practices can be facilitated via simple, low-cost and creative gameplay as part of an educational or training program. This paper describes a game called RE-O-Poly that was developed to introduce and reinforce a fundamental set of established RE good practices. It then reports on a series of studies that were undertaken with undergraduates, graduates and IT professionals to gain preliminary validation of the game concept, to investigate results from use and to explore its positioning for adoption in an RE program. The findings are presented and inform a discussion about the wider role of gameplay in RE education and training.