Learning Gaps in Project-based Requirements Engineering Education - A Case Study of Student Projects

[Context and motivation] Learning Requirements Engineering is one of the key activities in teaching Software Engineering. Training computer science students to appreciate the importance of requirement engineering in practice is essential but also a difficult task. [Question/problem] In software requirements engineering education courses, project-based practice is commonly adopted as the pedagogical approach. However, feedback shows that projects taken in the class resulted in poorly translated requirements engineering skill sets required in the industry. [Principal ideas/results] This paper is to investigate and illustrate the student learning gaps observed in project-based requirements engineering education. Data containing software requirements were collected from 72 Computer Science student projects. The grounded theory approach had been systematically adopted, and keywords classified by requirements engineering activities were extracted from assessment comments. Based on the analysis of the comment keywords and report details, the issues exposed in student projects have been observed and summarized. Integrating with existing requirements engineering research, we discuss the causes from the teachers' perspective. The leading causes of students' underperformance in requirements engineering education learning outcomes are the lack of the industry environment, the lack of domain knowledge, and the lack of problem-solving skills. [Contribution] This paper contributes to the current educational effort in preparing students for the requirements engineering and software engineering community.