In the endeavour of making RE Education more accessible and available, I shared my semester-long Master-level course materials online. The videos are available on YouTube and have received 25k views from around the world, and the slides, assignments, and suggested readings are provided on Foss2Serve, a portal developed under NSF funding. The objective of this short paper is to explain what the available resources are, how this resource has come together and how it has been used. All materials are under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License and have been used at universities in at least 5 countries plus by individuals globally.
Many of us develop new course materials or rework our course materials every year, and it is
a lot of work - which maybe we could streamline more if we crowd-sourced. Hence my ofer.
I have been iterating my materials for teaching Requirements Engineering starting at TUM1,
then UCI2, and then CSULB3. In 2016/2017, two events prompted me to make my teaching
materials accessible and to share them via Creative Commons. First, I got involved with the
Humanitarian Free Open Source Software community [
© 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). CEUR Workshop Proceedings
Since the release of the materials under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License5, they have been used by colleagues to support their own materials, by peers I have never met but who reached out (and maybe some more who haven’t) and by students to supplement whichever learning materials they were given. Furthermore I have received a number of messages by practitioners who used the materials to brush up on certain aspects or to expand their knowledge. From enquiries that I received I know that the materials have been used in at least 5 countries on three continents (Europe, North America, South America).
The course is by no means perfect, but it is a solid foundation to build upon and free for all to use and adapt.
The graduate course on Requirements Engineering was held every Spring semester in a fiteen week course that meets twice per week. Each meeting consists of a 50 minute lecture and a 75 minute lab session. The course follows the thematic outline presented in the left column of Table 1. The assignments that students carry out in the lab are composed of individual and team assignments. The team assignments are parts of a requirements specification, so that over the course of the semester, each team develops a complete requirements specification for a system.
In previous years, students were allowed to come up with their own system ideas to develop specifications for. While that sparked the creativity of some students, a more likely scenario they will be developing specifications for in the future is that there are legacy systems that need to be analyzed and adapted or extended. One solution to this is using an HFOSS system to analyze and evolve — at the same time, many HFOSS systems do not have well documented requirements and therefore this is a potential win-win for both the open source community (because the students contribute) and the students (because they get to work with a real-life system including adequate complexity and challenges). For the HFOSS integration, we adapted the assignments to reengineer specific requirements artifacts as opposed to “inventing” requirements for them.
All slides are available on slideshare [
The YouTube playlist [
Pinto et al. [
To the best of my knowledge, there is no RE course yet that makes all materials available for use and, in addition, ofers an integration with open source content.
The structure and contents of the course are based on ten years of experience in teaching requirements engineering. While the author has not worked in industry full-time during that period, the relation with industry practices is maintained by frequent conversations at conferences and in her private network. Some of the techniques taught in the course have to this day not found wide application in industry (but could incur significant benefits), others are widely used and
The challenges and lessons learned on the implementation of the open source version are that projects be may dificult to interact with in a limited course setting unless the instructor is a long-standing contributor well acquainted with the community. The version independent of a specific open source project always let students choose their own project ideas which sometimes led to great results (but no strong relation to industrial practice where greenfield development isn’t the norm) and other times to contributions that could synergistically benefit another course.
The feedback to report on is four-fold: Alumni who graduated in the mean time, students from other universities and countries who have used the materials in addition to courses or because there was no dedicated course, practitioners who wanted to expand their knowledge, and educators who have used the materials in their own teachings. I have received acknowledgement from alumni for the usefulness of this course in their practice now, from students from abroad who found it useful to complement their education, from practitioners who wanted to expand into business analysis or just broader their understanding, and from instructors who were grateful to be able to reuse existing materials.
The current limitations are mainly related to coursework in general: no lecture ever seems perfect and there are always new approaches that could be introduced. That said, this version of the course is a good baseline to start with.
The opportunities for further improvement are mainly related to making the content easier to teach online, for example by support of quizzes and reflection questions that would otherwise be discussed in class.
My personal objective is to make educational resources freely available wherever I can, to dedicatedly support educators and (aspiring) students in countries or at universities with less resources. I hope the resources continue to be used widely and help out educators, students and interested practitioners alike.
I thank Heidi Ellis, Darci Burdge, Stoney Jackson, Lori Postner, Greg Hislop, Gina Likins and Clif Kussmaul for a great POSSE workshop in Raleigh, NC, on how to better incorporate FOSS into teaching. Part of this work has been made possible by part of the NSF grant DUE-1225688 received as subcontractor to develop some of the assignments used in this course. Also thanks to the anonymous reviewers for suggesting discussion items.