An Undergraduate Requirements Engineering Curriculum with Formal Methods

In this article, we present a requirements engineering curriculum in the context of an undergraduate course on software engineering for students of computer science. The novelty of our approach is a broadened scope where we complement the discussion of established notions and concepts with the concept of formal methods, that is, specification notations with precisely defined, formal syntax and semantics. To this end, we have chosen one very simple formal notation, the well-known decision tables, which allows us to give a comprehensive definition of syntax and semantics, and precise notions of completeness, consistency, vacuity, etc. in one lecture. The didactical idea is that if students are exposed to one comprehensive example, it should be significantly easier to adapt to one of the numerous formal specification notations in use (or about to be in use) in their future workplace. To complete the picture of the spectrum of formal notations, the curriculum includes Live Sequence Charts as a more expressive formal notation (which comes at the price of a more complex definition), again with comprehensive definition of syntax and semantics.