What is essential? – a pilot survey on views about the requirements metamodel of reqT.org

[Context & motivation] This research preview paper presents ongoing work on the metamodel of a free software requirements modeling tool called reqT that is developed in an educational context. The work aims to make an initial validation of a survey instrument that elicits views on the metamodel of the reqT tool, which aims to engage computer science students in Requirements Engineering (RE) through an open source DSL embedded in the Scala programming language. [Question] The research question is: Which RE concepts are essential to include in the metamodel for a requirements engineering tool in an educational context? [Principal ideas] A survey instrument is developed, with a list of 92 concepts (49 entities, 15 relations and 28 attributes) and a set of questions for each concept, to elicit the respondents’ views on the usage and interpretation of each concept. [Contribution] The survey is initially validated in a pilot study involving 14 Swedish RE scholars as subjects. The survey results indicate that the survey is feasible. The analysis of the responses suggest that many of the concepts in the metamodel are used frequently by the respondents and there is a large degree of agreement among the respondents about the meaning of the concepts. The results are encouraging for future work on empirical validation of the relevance of the reqT metamodel

Competencias para desempeñar la labor de captura de requisitos en un entorno de desarrollo global del software

La captura de requisitos de un software es un proceso eminentemente comunicativo, por consiguiente, una buena o mala comunicación influye en la calidad final del producto desarrollado. Los problemas típicos de esta etapa se ven incrementados cuando los participantes del proceso se encuentran distribuidos geográficamente bajo el paradigma del Desarrollo Global del Software (GSD en inglés). Cumplir el desafío de ejecutar dicha actividad de manera exitosa requiere de una adecuada preparación de los profesionales involucrados en la captura de requisitos. En este contexto hemos revisado la bibliografía en busca de las habilidades y conocimientos necesarios para desempeñar la labor de captura de requisitos. Luego de un proceso de análisis y síntesis, identificamos las competencias necesarias para la captura de requisitos presentando los resultados en tres grupos de interés: las competencias que son igualmente importantes en captura localizada y en GSD, las competencias que aumentan de importancia en entornos globales y las competencias que sólo son relevantes en escenarios GSD. Estas competencias pueden ser utilizadas tanto, para el desarrollo de curriculums adaptados a GSD, como en la industria, para el reclutamiento de personal.Este trabajo es parcialmente financiado por los proyectos: MELISA (PAC08-0142-3315), Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha, Consejería de Educación y Ciencia, en España; ESFINGE (TIN2006-15175-C05-05) Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (Dirección General de Investigación)/Fondos Europeos de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) en España; CompetiSoft (506AC0287, programa CYTED)

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

The association between tolerance for ambiguity and fear of negative evaluation: A study of engineering technology capstone courses

For many students in engineering and engineering technology programs in the US, senior capstone design courses require students to form a team, define a problem, and find a feasible technical solution to address this problem. Students must integrate the knowledge and skills acquired during their studies at the college or university level. These truly integrative design activities do not have a single “correct” solution. Instead, there is an array of solutions, many of which could be used to achieve the final result. This ambiguity can cause students to experience anxiety during the projects. This study examined the main topics: • To what extent is a social anxiety (measured as fear of negative evaluation) related to tolerance for ambiguity in senior engineering capstone courses? • How does exposure to ambiguity prior to and during capstone courses affect tolerance for ambiguity? The study looked at the standard educational practices to see if they have unintended consequences, such a social anxiety in dealing with ambiguity. Those consequences are highly undesirable because they reduce students’ learning. It was hypothesized that the lecture-based approaches that are more common in the first three years of study would not prepare students for self-directed capstone courses because the students would rarely have experienced problem-based learning before. The study used a quantitative approach and examined students’ perceptions of their tolerance for ambiguity, and social anxiety before and after their senior capstone design experience. A survey instrument was adapted to measure exposure to ambiguity, which was studied as a potential moderator of the relationship between social anxiety and tolerance for ambiguity. The study indicated that social anxiety, as measured by fear of negative evaluation, does not play a major role in capstone courses. The second finding is that a single course, even if it was administered as a problem-based senior class, failed to increase students’ tolerance for ambiguity. Students with low tolerance have more problems with ambiguity, whereas students with high tolerance can more easily endure changes and find it easier to act in the absence of complete information. The third important finding was that exposure to ambiguity prior to capstone courses does affect tolerance for ambiguity while controlling for instructor and if exposure to ambiguity is included as a moderator. It was not in the scope of this study to explore the effect of instructor more deeply, but this provides a direction for future research, especially in this time of expanding implementation of project- and problem-based learning methods in technical curricula

Investigating the Presence of Culture in Engineering Design: A Case Study on Culture in Design Methods, Perception, and Outcomes

Overwhelming global statistics on economic, social, and health disparities has driven engineers and designers to develop solutions to minimize these disparities [1,2,11,12,3–10]. For the scope of this study, these efforts are referred to as design for humanitarian engineering and global development (HEGD). HEGD solutions are designed to improve access to medical technologies, energy, clean water, and even spark economic development [1–10]. However, many HEGD solutions go unadopted, halting their intended benefits [9,13,22,23,14–21]. Efforts to improve HEGD adoption have focused on ways to incorporate culture in the design solution’s aesthetics or in approaches post-deployment [24,25,34,35,26–33]. However, a review of failed HEGD efforts with a cultural lens highlights one reason adoption suffers is that the design solutions lack cultural fit, not meeting cultural needs in design form and function [9,13,23,36–38,15–22]. A lack of cultural fit in design solutions suggests there may be a lack of consideration and representation of target user culture in the early design stages, particularly when making design requirements. This work focuses on describing the consideration and representation of target user culture when designers make design requirements. Using the cultural elements (Social Organization, Economic Systems, Language & Symbols, Customs & Traditions, Arts & Literature, Forms of Government, and Religion [39,40,49,41–48]), a 3-part study was conducted to understand the cultural representation and consideration when making design requirements. Three main factors influence the development of design requirements; the designer, the tool or method used to develop iii requirements, and the design requirements developed. Each part of this 3-part study describes cultural representation in one of the three main influences. The first study was a comparative analysis that focuses on understanding the frequency that target user culture is represented in engineering design requirements. Cultural frequencies in requirements from HEGD and non-global context projects were calculated and compared to highlight differences in cultural representation. The frequency of culture in HEGD design requirements was lower than for projects with no-global context. The second study explored the frequency of culture in engineering design methods by highlighting the information the methods explicitly encourage designers to collect. A thematic content analysis was conducted on 10 engineering design methods and themes were developed to represent the types of information methods encourage the designer to collect. Results show that engineering design methods encourage designers to collect cultural information, but methods fall short in relating the cultural information to design requirement development. The final study investigated cultural representation in the designer’s considerations when making design requirements. Using a quasi-experimental case study, designer considerations and design outcomes were captured, and the effects of the Cultural Elements Requirements Assessment (CERA) on consideration and outcomes were investigated. This study demonstrates that designers consider cultural information and generate cultural requirements. CERA also increased designer considerations for cultural information