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Is role playing in Requirements Engineering Education increasing learning outcome?

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Abstract

Requirements Engineering has attracted a great deal of attention from researchers and practitioners in recent years. This increasing interest requires academia to provide students with a solid foundation in the subject matter. In Requirements Engineering Education (REE), it is important to cover three fundamental topics: traditional analysis and modeling skills, interviewing skills for requirements elicitation, and writing skills for specifying requirements. REE papers report about using role playing as a pedagogical tool; however, there is a surprising lack of empirical evidence on its utility. In this paper we investigate whether a higher grade in a role playing project have an effect on students’ score in an individual written exam in a Requirements Engineering course. Data are collected from 412 students between the years of 2007 and 2014 at Lund University and Chalmers | University of Gothenburg. The results show that students who received a higher grade in the role playing project scored statistically significant higher in the written exam compared to the students with a lower role playing project grade.

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Notes

  1. http://cs.lth.se/ets170.

  2. http://gul.gu.se/public/courseId/64509/coursePath/40149/ecp/lang-en/publicPage.do.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Software Engineering Research Lab Sweden, Blekinge Institute of Technology, 37140, Karlskrona, Sweden

    Richard Berntsson Svensson

  2. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers and University of Gothenburg, 41296, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Richard Berntsson Svensson

  3. Department of Computer Science, Lund University, PO Box 118, 22100, Lund, Sweden

    Björn Regnell

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  2. Björn Regnell
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Correspondence to Richard Berntsson Svensson.

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Svensson, R.B., Regnell, B. Is role playing in Requirements Engineering Education increasing learning outcome?. Requirements Eng 22, 475–489 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-016-0248-4

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