Leveraging LLMs for Requirements Engineering Education: How to Approach?

Requirements Engineering (RE) is a key yet often challenging phase that demands a good understanding of stakeholder needs, domain, elicitation methods, and documentation practices. Teaching RE is challenging due to the complexity of technical processes paired with critical soft skills. Role-Playing is a common and efficient technique in RE Education (REE), strengthening students’ comprehension of stakeholder interaction and requirement elicitation. The quality and consistency of traditional role-playing are nevertheless susceptible to the instructor’s facilitation abilities, students’ role-playing capabilities, and the dynamic of each group. The emergence of Generative AI (GenAI) and subsequent Large Language Models (LLMs) has introduced new opportunities for providing tailored support to students beyond conventional learning resources. In this paper, we explore the potential of LLMs for REE and how LLMs can assist in teaching RE concepts to students. We have conducted a pilot study with forty-six students to explore teaching RE concepts and developing pedagogy in REE by assigning the role of co-analyst to the LLM. Our results show that LLMs help students understand problems from various perspectives, providing a realistic view of the underlying complexities and alternative solutions for the RE tasks.