Teaching requirements analysis by means of student collaboration

Teaching systems analysis is a difficult task due to the procedural type of knowledge that must be acquired by the students in a highly practical fashion, in similar conditions to the ones that the future software engineer will find in the workplace. Some years ago we put into practice a model for the laboratory classroom in which students belonging to different undergraduate software engineering courses collaborate in the development of the analysis of a software product, with emphasis on the quality of both the process and the final product. A group of students plays the role of the development team and another plays the role of the software quality assurance team, carrying out formal technical reviews of the others' work. In this article, the authors describe this model.