Inspectors academy: pedagogical design for requirements inspection training

Bano M, Zowghi D, Ferrari A, Spoletini P

Empirical study  Requirements engineering Education and training  Requirements inspection 

The core aim of requirements inspection is to ensure the high quality of already elicited requirements in the Software Requirements Specification. Teaching requirements inspection to novices is challenging, as inspecting requirements needs several skills as well as knowledge of the product and process that is hard to achieve in a classroom environment. Published studies about pedagogical design specifically for teaching requirements inspection are scarce. Our objective is to present the design and evaluation of a postgraduate course for requirements inspection training. We conducted an empirical study with 138 postgraduate students, teamed up in 34 groups to conduct requirements inspection. We performed qualitative analysis on the data collected from students' reflection reports to assess the effects of the pedagogical design in terms of benefits and challenges. We also quantitatively analyze the correlation between the students' performance in conducting inspections and their ability of writing specifications. From the analysis of students' reflections, several themes emerged such as their difficulty of working with limited information, but also revealed the benefits of learning teamwork and writing good requirements. This qualitative analysis also provides recommendations for improving the related activities. The results revealed a moderate positive correlation between the performance in writing specification and inspection.

Publisher: IEEE