Using Motivational Models to Promote Emotional Goals Among Software Engineering Students

There has been increasing awareness in recent years of the importance of considering broader, social and personal goals in software engineering. One important aspect is the need to engender certain feelings in users when they interact with software. Such emotional goals are relatively new to software development. While there are established methods for teaching requirements elicitation for standard goals and evaluating whether they have been met, there is much less work on evaluating whether emotional goals have been met through software. For the past five years, emotional goals have been explicitly included while teaching software requirements with students at The University of Melbourne and Swinburne University of Technology, both in dedicated subjects and in project subjects. Students have been strongly encouraged to incorporate emotional goals in the design of projects' requirements through the use of motivational models. In this paper we discuss and reflect on our experience teaching motivational modelling that is aimed at supporting students in the creation and evaluation of emotional goals in the software requirements phase.