Learning requirements elicitation interviews with role-playing, self-assessment and peer-review

Ferrari A, Spoletini P, Bano M, Zowghi D

Communication mistakes  Education  Empirical evaluation  Experiment  Interview  Interview mistakes  Mistakes  Quantitative analysis  Requirements elicitation interview  Requirements engineering  Training  Training material 

Interviews are largely used in the practice of requirements elicitation. Nevertheless, performing an effective interview often depends on soft-skills, and on knowledge acquired through experience. When it comes to requirements engineering education and training (REET), limited resources and few well-founded pedagogical approaches are available to allow students to acquire and improve their skills as interviewers. This paper presents a novel pedagogical approach that combines role-playing, peer-review and self-assessment to enable students to reflect on their mistakes, and improve their interview skills. We evaluate the approach through a controlled quasi-experiment. The study shows that the approach significantly reduces the amount of mistakes made by the students. Feedback from the participants confirms the usefulness and easiness of the proposed training. This work contributes to the body of knowledge of REET with an empirically evaluated method for teaching inter-views. Furthermore, we share the pedagogical material used, to enable other educators to apply and possibly tailor the approach.