Requirements Analysis Skills: How to Train Practitioners?

One of the goals of any software development organization (SDO) is the assurance of a high quality software. To achieve this, it is important to perform all the software related activities, especially those of the requirements engineering (RE) phase, in the right way and ideally by experts. However, the current practice reveals that this crucial phase is commonly performed by people with limited experience in RE, indeed, some of them ignoring the basic activities. We present a training plan in order to improve practitioners' RE analysis skills. The training plan was applied to 44 practitioners working at a Mexican SDO. We developed such a plan based on the idea of considering six main dimensions that include theory, tests and mentoring sessions. The so called dimensions are: understanding the organization's domain, basic concepts of RE, requirements elicitation, requirements expression, requirements prioritization and requirements analysis. In this paper, we present what are the topics discussed in each dimension, the feedback received by the practitioners after the training and how we envision the evolution of the training plan.