Complete thesis - Murdoch University

.AbstractIt is acknowledged within the systems development literature, and by practitioners, thatRequirements Engineering/Analysis is fundamental to the delivery of high quality software.It is also widely agreed that many of the problems identified in software-intensive systemscan be traced back to this component of the project. Practitioner studies suggest that someof these problems can be traced to formal education – skills and knowledge needed in dailywork are not being well developed through their formal IT education.The implications for graduates entering the discipline of Requirements Engineering include:• their conceptualisation does not match the reality of the profession: the educationthey have received does not prepare them for the real-world – the discipline is seen asneeding conceptual knowledge in several overlapping domains at a competency levelthat approaches expertise, while the approach advocated in much of the literaturehampers practice• the appropriate soft skills valued by practitioners are not well developed through formaleducation. These include affective and cognitive skills as well as understanding of the‘context’ in which the task being addressed exists• generic attributes, such as life-long learning, which addresses the adaptability and flexibilityrequired by practitioners, are also not well developed through formal education.The purpose of this research is to address the issue of education for Requirements Engineers.This thesis argues that a framework can be developed that more closely models the experiencesof practitioners, and addresses their expectations of novice Requirements Engineers.By examining the gap between the competency expectations of practitioners and traditionalformal education for the discipline, and then matching these gaps with strategies drawn fromthe literature of learning theory and models that purport to focus on these, this study showsthat non-traditional approaches provide leverage for a graduate entering the profession ofRequirements Engineering.xiv