SaPeer and ReverseSaPeer: teaching requirements elicitation interviews with role-playing and role reversal

Abstract

Among the variety of the available requirements elicitation techniques, interviews are the most commonly used. Performing effective interviews is challenging, especially for students and novice analysts, since interviews’ success depends largely on soft skills and experience. Despite their diffusion and their challenging nature, 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. To overcome this limitation, this paper presents two pedagogical approaches, namely SaPeer and ReverseSaPeer. SaPeer uses role-playing, peer review and self-assessment to enable students to experience first-hand the difficulties related to the interviewing process, reflect on their mistakes, and improve their interview skills by practice and analysis. ReverseSaPeer builds on the first approach and includes a role reversal activity in which participants play the role of a customer interviewed by a competent interviewer. We evaluate the effectiveness of SaPeer through a controlled quasi-experiment, which shows that the proposed approach significantly reduces the amount of mistakes made by the participants and that it is perceived as useful and easy by the participants. ReverseSaPeer and the impact of role reversal are analyzed through a thematic analysis of the participant’s reflections. The analysis shows that not only the students perceive the analysis as beneficial, but also that they have emotional involvement in learning. This work contributes to the body of knowledge of REET with two methods, quantitative and qualitative evaluated, respectively. Furthermore, we share the pedagogical material used, to enable other educators to apply and possibly tailor the approach.

Full text

Vol.:(0123456789)
1 3
Requirements Engineering (2020) 25:417–438
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-020-00334-0
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
SaPeer
and
reverSeSaPeer
: teaching requirements elicitation interviews
withrole‑playing androle reversal
AlessioFerrari1· PaolaSpoletini2 · MuneeraBano3· DidarZowghi4
Received: 14 December 2019 / Accepted: 19 May 2020 / Published online: 16 July 2020
© Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
Among the variety of the available requirements elicitation techniques, interviews are the most commonly used. Performing
effective interviews is challenging, especially for students and novice analysts, since interviews’ success depends largely
on soft skills and experience. Despite their diffusion and their challenging nature, when it comes to requirements engineer-
ing 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. To overcome this limitation, this paper presents two pedagogi-
cal approaches, namely
SaPeer
and
reverSeSaPeer
.
SaPeer
uses role-playing, peer review and self-assessment to enable
students to experience first-hand the difficulties related to the interviewing process, reflect on their mistakes, and improve
their interview skills by practice and analysis.
reverSeSaPeer
builds on the first approach and includes a role reversal activ-
ity in which participants play the role of a customer interviewed by a competent interviewer. We evaluate the effectiveness
of
SaPeer
through a controlled quasi-experiment, which shows that the proposed approach significantly reduces the amount
of mistakes made by the participants and that it is perceived as useful and easy by the participants.
reverSeSaPeer
and the
impact of role reversal are analyzed through a thematic analysis of the participant’s reflections. The analysis shows that
not only the students perceive the analysis as beneficial, but also that they have emotional involvement in learning. This
work contributes to the body of knowledge of REET with two methods, quantitative and qualitative evaluated, respectively.
Furthermore, we share the pedagogical material used, to enable other educators to apply and possibly tailor the approach.
Keywords Requirements elicitation· Interviews· REET· Peer review· Role-playing· Self-assessment
1 Introduction
Interviews between a requirements analyst and a customer,
as well as other stakeholders such as domain or technical
experts, are one of the most commonly used techniques to
elicit requirements [2, 23, 35]. The ability of the analyst
to gather correct and complete requirements from different
stakeholders often depends on the analyst’s experience as
well as on soft skills [3, 25, 35, 45, 62, 65]. Given the mul-
tiple factors influencing the success of elicitation interviews,
teaching the art of interviews to software engineering and
computer science students, and young analysts in general, is
particularly difficult, also due to the limited resources nor-
mally available for educational activities specifically focused
on requirements engineering (RE) [32, 47].
Role-playing offers experiential learning through the
simulation of real-world scenarios; for this reason, it is
widely used in disciplines where soft skills and experience
are relevant for the success of a task. In RE education and
* Paola Spoletini
pspoleti@kennesaw.edu
Alessio Ferrari
alessio.ferrari@isti.cnr.it
Muneera Bano
muneera.bano@deakin.edu.au
Didar Zowghi
didar.zowghi@uts.edu.au
1 ISTI-CNR: Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie
dell’Informazione “A. Faedo”, Consiglio Nazionale delle
Ricerche Area della Ricerca di Pisa, Via Giuseppe Moruzzi,
1, 56127Pisa, PI, Italy
2 Department ofSoftware Engineering andGame
Development, Kennesaw State University, Building J, Office
375, 1100 South Marietta Pkwy, Marietta, GA30060, USA
3 School ofInfo Technology, Deakin University Burwood
Campus/221, Burwood Hwy, Burwood, VIC3125, Australia
4 Faculty ofEngineering andIT, University ofTechnology
Sydney (UTS), PO Box123, Broadway, NSW2007,
Australia
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