A Multi-Level Didactical Approach to Build up Competencies in Requirements Engineering

Requirements engineering education at universities is a fairly difficult issue for various reasons. Among the most prominent causes is a lack of authenticity, i.e. too artificial settings that do not adequately mirror the complexity of realworld situations. We present an approach to requirements engineering education that tries to avoid some of these shortcomings, in particular by including requirements elicitation with real customers into an integrated didactic step-by-step approach. As it turns out, requirements engineering education is far more than assembling technical knowledge, but rather involves many non-technical skills that obtain a specific contextsensitive flavor in requirements engineering. Our didactic approach also addresses these skills, while resting on a sound pedagogical underpinning. Indications for the success of our approach are visible, e.g., in self-evaluations of the participants which are also summarized in the paper.