Abstract:

Requirement Engineering (RE) have been widely introduced as an obligatory discipline in most of the software engineering curricula at the universities. Requirement Engineering comprises concepts, activities, methods and techniques that enable modeling, analyzing, documenting, validating and managing requirements for software systems. The process of teaching and learning this discipline, however, covers a number of challenges. In practice, this happened for both teachers and students. For the former because they need to be qualified to create an environment in which students can learn and practice requirements engineering skills; and for the latter, as they require several skills for the correct understanding of the discipline. This paper presents a systematic review which aims at characterizing the teaching and learning of RE, by identifying and classifying the available papers related to this context; the review considers four questions: (1) What are the teaching and learning problems mentioned? (2) What strategies are being used for teaching and learning requirements engineering? (3) Do the papers mention the motivation of the student in the studies? (4) Which countries and research institutions are involved in related researches? The systematic review covers papers published between 2010 and 2016, available in seven different scientific databases. In the initial phase of the review’ search, 956 papers were returned. After applying the criteria for exclusion and inclusion of the papers, and after adding 4 studies recommended by specialists, the set was reduced to 86 papers, which were fully read, reviewed and analyzed. The results indicate that the greatest challenges are the difficulty in understanding the theoretical RE concepts without the use of a real software development scenario; this makes difficult the creation of associations between theory and practice. To mitigate these problems, some papers mention the application of techniques like exposing students to more realistic and challenging environments, trying to generate a more attractive and practical learning.

Keywords:

Learning, teaching, systematic review, requirements engineering.