Exploring Emerging Technologies for Requirements Elicitation Interview Training: Empirical Assessment of Robotic and Virtual Tutors

Requirements elicitation interviews are a widely adopted technique, where the interview success heavily depends on the interviewer's preparedness and communication skills. Students can enhance these skills through practice interviews. However, organizing practice interviews for many students presents scalability challenges, given the time and effort required to involve stakeholders in each session. To address this, we propose REIT, an extensible architecture for Requirements Elicitation Interview Training system based on emerging educational technologies. REIT has components to support both the interview phase, wherein students act as interviewers while the system assumes the role of an interviewee, and the feedback phase, during which the system assesses students' performance and offers contextual and behavioral feedback to enhance their interviewing skills. We demonstrate the applicability of REIT through two implementations: RoREIT with a physical robotic agent and VoREIT with a virtual voice-only agent. We empirically evaluated both instances with a group of graduate students. The participants appreciated both systems. They demonstrated higher learning gain when trained with RoREIT, but they found VoREIT more engaging and easier to use. These findings indicate that each system has distinct benefits and drawbacks, suggesting that REIT can be realized for various educational settings based on preferences and available resources.Comment: Author submitted manuscrip

A Systematic Literature Review of Requirements Engineering Education

Requirements engineering (RE) has established itself as a core software engineering discipline. It is well acknowledged that good RE leads to higher quality software and considerably reduces the risk of failure or budget-overspending of software development projects. It is of vital importance to train future software engineers in RE and educate future requirements engineers to adequately manage requirements in various projects. To this date, there exists no central concept of what RE education shall comprise. To lay a foundation, we report on a systematic literature review of the feld and provide a systematic map describing the current state of RE education. Doing so allows us to describe how the educational landscape has changed over the last decade. Results show that only a few established author collaborations exist and that RE education research is predominantly published in venues other than the top RE research venues (i.e., in venues other than the RE conference and journal). Key trends in RE instruction of the past decade include involvement of real or realistic stakeholders, teaching predominantly elicitation as an RE activity, and increasing student factors such as motivation or communication skills. Finally, we discuss open opportunities in RE education, such as training for security requirements and supply chain risk management, as well as developing a pedagogical foundation grounded in evidence of effective instructional approaches