A Survey of Instructional Approaches in the Requirements Engineering Education Literature

Requirements engineering (RE) has established itself as a core software engineering discipline. It is well acknowledged that good RE leads to higher quality software and considerably reduces the risk of failure or exceeding budgets of software development projects. Therefore, it is of vital importance to train future software engineers in RE and educate future requirements engineers to adequately manage requirements in various projects. However, to date there exists no central concept of what the most useful educational approaches are in RE education in order to best interweave theory with practice. To lay the foundation for this important mission, we conducted a systematic literature review. In this paper, we report on the results and provide a synthesis of instructional approaches in RE education. Findings show that experiential learning through projects, collaboration, and realistic stakeholder involvement are among the most promising trends to teach both RE theory and develop student soft skills.