ImProject: Improving RE Trainings by Combining them with Improvisation Theatre Sessions A Research Proposal

Today factual knowledge training and soft skill training are typically taught as separate disciplines. This approach falls short of the need of the participants to learn, understand and experience the application of typical soft skills such as communication skills within their domain. Requirements engineering (RE) in practice requires for instance excellent communication skills. We propose to use techniques from improvisation theatre to combine factual knowledge and soft skill training into one workshop format, which we call ImProject. We propose to add ImProject as a training element/part of normal RE training. ImProject adopts a typical improvisation theatre training session and trains soft skills such as communication skills in typical RE situations. In this paper, we present our research agenda for investigating how factual knowledge training such as RE and soft skill training can be combined using ImProject and derive further needed research activities. This interdisciplinary research will contribute to improve training within the RE community.