Teaching Requirements Engineering in Global Software Development: A report on a three-University collaboration

The importance of teaching Requirements Engineer- ing in global software engineering is emphasised when considered within the context of increasing pressure to adopt global approaches to software development. This realization led to the identification of need for an aca- demic course which would facilitate the development of students' RE skills in distributed projects. This paper reports our experience in coordinating and teaching of a course intended to prepare our gradu- ates for requirements engineering activities in global cus- tomer-developer relationships. The course was taught in a collaboration of three universities in disparate locations, time zones and culture: Canada, Australia and Italy. The students from the three locations played the roles of a client and developer and experienced the iterative devel- opment of a requirements specification in global projects. We present some of the challenges encountered in teach- ing this course across universities, different cultures and time zones, and briefly describe some of the evaluation instruments we employed in assessing the success of the course. Our intention is to gather feedback from the audi- ence and possible ideas on how to improve for next itera- tion.