Distributing responsibilities to engineer better requirements: Leveraging knowledge and perspectives for students to learn a key skill

Abstract

Getting students to appreciate the value of writing high quality requirements can be a difficult undertaking. This paper spotlights an educational experience in which students from across the globe were brought together to write the requirements for a software development competition in order to address this challenge. To account for a disparity of educational backgrounds while promoting quality, a model was designed to include requirements coaching, reinforced requirements auditing cycles and multi-perspective triggers for requirements change. The paper describes the multiplicity of roles that were created and the strategies that were undertaken in an attempt to improve the quality of the written requirements, summarizes the outcomes of the experience, and highlights the observed costs/benefits of teaching this skill and conveying its value in this manner. The application of such a model to distributed software development projects more generally is discussed.