A systematic literature review of requirements engineering education

Abstract

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 field 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.

Keywords: Learning outcomes; Pedagogy; Requirements engineering; Requirements engineering education; Systematic literature review.

Fig. 1

Study selection process

Fig. 2

Data extraction process

Fig. 3

Automatically generated map of author networks. Red lines indicate connections between authors, who are part of two collaboration groups. The darker the hue, the more co-authored papers (Color figure online)

Fig. 4

Fragment of author networks only including those with more than one collaboration

Fig. 5

Publications and venues per year. Each bar represents one year, with cumulative counts of publications per year (RQ4) listed at the top of each bar. Bars are sub-divided by type of publication venue (RQ3) to illustrate changes in venue over time

Fig. 6

Citation network of articles (dots) being cited by other articles (edges, head pointing to cited article). As can be seen, only six articles are cited four or more times, suggesting no common foundation of RE education literature

Fig. 7

“Other” contributions from Table 8

Fig. 8

Type of learners addressed

Fig. 9

Topics of interest

Fig. 10

Type of educational approach

Fig. 11

Publications per year proposing an industry-centric learning outcomes and educational approaches

Fig. 12

Studies explicitly instructing RE activities

Fig. 13

Studies explicitly instructing requirements quality

Fig. 14

Studies explicitly improving soft skills

Fig. 15

Studies explicitly improving student factors