Critical Issues in Requirements Engineering Education

Abstract

Requirements Engineering (RE) is the most crucial process within software development projects. In order to prepare skilled requirements engineers, Requirements Engineering Education (REE) needs to be provided to students at the university level before they become software engineers and part of the workforce. However, RE is considered the most difficult subject within the software engineering curriculum for students to learn and for lecturers to teach due to its uncertain nature. This chapter examines the current and potential areas for research within REE. It first presents the current status of REE provided in universities and the REE problems reported in the literature that lead us to the potential research problems in REE. The REE teaching approaches proposed by researchers are then elaborated. The proposed approaches are mapped back to address the REE problems. The chapter closes with recommended directions for future REE research.