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Requirements are elicited from the customer and other stakeholders through an iterative process of interviews, prototyping, and other interactive sessions. Then, requirements can be further extended, based on the analysis of the features of competing products available on the market. Understanding how this process takes place can help to identify the contribution of the different elicitation phases, thereby allowing requirements analysts to better distribute their resources. In this work, we empirically study in which way requirements get transformed from initial ideas into documented needs, and then evolve based on the inspiration coming from similar products. To this end, we select 30 subjects that act as requirements analysts, and we perform interview-based elicitation sessions with a fictional customer. After the sessions, the analysts produce a first set of requirements for the system. Then, they are required to search similar products in the app stores and extend the requirements, inspired by the identified apps. The requirements documented at each step are evaluated, to assess to which extent and in which way the initial idea evolved throughout the process. Our results show that only between 30% and 38% of the requirements produced after the interviews include content that can be fully traced to initial customer’s ideas. The rest of the content is dedicated to new requirements, and up to 21% of it belongs to completely novel topics. Furthermore, up to 42% of the requirements inspired by the app stores cover additional features compared to the ones identified after the interviews. The results empirically show that requirements are not elicited in strict sense, but actually co-created through interviews, with analysts playing a crucial role in the process. In addition, we show evidence that app store-inspired elicitation can be particularly beneficial to complete the requirements. 

Capturing users' engagement is crucial for gathering feedback about the features of a software product. In a market-driven context, current approaches to collect and analyze users' feedback are based on techniques leveraging information extracted from product reviews and social media. These approaches are hardly applicable in bespoke software development, or in contexts in which one needs to gather information from specific users. In such cases, companies need to resort to face-to-face interviews to get feedback on their products. In this paper, we propose to utilize biofeedback to complement interviews with information about the engagement of the user on the discussed features and topics. We evaluate our approach by interviewing users while gathering their biometric data using an Empatica E4 wristband. Our results show that we can predict users' engagement by training supervised machine learning algorithms on the biometric data. The results of our work can be used to facilitate the prioritization of product features and to guide the interview based on users' engagement. 

[Context and motivation] Role-playing offers experiential learning through the simulation of real-world scenarios; for this reason, it is widely used in software engineering education. In Requirements Engineering, role-playing is a popular way to provide students hands-on experience with requirements elicitation interviews. [Problem] However, managing a role-playing activity to simulate requirements elicitation interviews in a class is time-consuming, as it often requires pairing students with student assistants or fellow classmates who act as either customers or requirements analysts as well as creating and maintaining the interview schedules between the actors. To make the adoption of role-playing activities in a class feasible, there is a need to develop a solution to reduce instructors’ workload. [Principal ideas] To solve this problem we propose the use of VIrtual CustOmer (VICO), an intent-based, multimodal, conversational agent. VICO offers an interview experience comparable to talking to a human and provides a transcript of the interview annotated with the mistakes students made in it. The adoption of VICO will eliminate the need to schedule interviews as the students can interact with it in their free time. Moreover, the transcript of the interview allows students to evaluate their performance to refine and improve their interviewing skills. [Contribution] In this research preview, we show the architecture of VICO and how it can be developed using existing technologies, we provide an online rule-based initial prototype and show the practicality and applicability of this tool through an exploratory study. 

Interviews are the most widely used elicitation technique in requirements engineering (RE). However, conducting a requirements elicitation interview is challenging. The mistakes made in design or conduct of the interviews can create problems in the later stages of requirements analysis. Empirical evidence about effective pedagogical approaches for training novices on conducting requirements elicitation interviews is scarce. In this paper, we present a novel pedagogical approach for training student analysts in the art of elicitation interviews. Our study is conducted in two parts: first, we perform an observational study of interviews performed by novices, and we present a classification of the most common mistakes made; second, we utilize this list of mistakes and monitor the students’ progress in three set of interviews to discover the individual areas for improvement. We conducted an empirical study involving role-playing and authentic assessment in two semesters on two different cohorts of students. In the first semester, we had 110 students, teamed up in 28 groups, to conduct three interviews with stakeholders. We qualitatively analysed the data to identify and classify the mistakes made from their first interview only. In the second semester, we had 138 students in 34 groups and we monitored and analysed their progress in all three interviews by utilizing the list of mistakes from the first study. First, we identified 34 unique mistakes classified into seven high-level themes, namely question formulation, question omission, interview order, communication skills, analyst behaviour, customer interaction, teamwork and planning. In the second study, we discovered that the students struggled mostly in the areas of question formulation, question omission and interview order and did not manage to improve their skills throughout the three interviews. Our study presents a novel and repeatable pedagogical design, and our findings extend the body of knowledge aimed at RE education and training by providing an empirically grounded categorization of mistakes made by novices. We offer an analysis of the main pain points in which instructors should pay more attention during their design and training. 

[Context] Interviews are the most widely used elicitation technique in requirements engineering. However, conducting effective requirements elicitation interviews is challenging, due to the combination of technical and soft skills that requirements analysts often acquire after a long period of professional practice. Empirical evidence about training the novices on conducting effective requirements elicitation interviews is scarce. [Objectives] We present a list of most common mistakes that novices make in requirements elicitation interviews. The objective is to assist the educators in teaching interviewing skills to student analysts. [Research Method] We conducted an empirical study involving role-playing and authentic assessment with 110 students, teamed up in 28 groups, to conduct interviews with a customer. One researcher made observation notes during the interview while two researchers reviewed the recordings. We qualitatively analyzed the data to identify the themes and classify the mistakes. [Results and conclusion] We identified 34 unique mistakes classified into 7 high level themes. We also give examples of the mistakes made by the novices in each theme, to assist the educationists and trainers. Our research design is a novel combination of well-known pedagogical approaches described in sufficient details to make it repeatable for future requirements engineering education and training research. 

In the United States, only few undergraduate curricula for computing-related field majors have an entire course dedicated to requirements engineering (RE). Usually, these are the bachelors of science in software engineering (BS SWE), while bachelors of science in computer science (BS CS) cover the topic during an overview course on software engineering, and dedicate only a couple of weeks to RE. Recent studies have shown that companies have specific demands for the competences that requirements engineers should have, and often such competences, such as analytical thinking and communication skills, are not sufficiently covered by RE textbooks and courses. However, no systematic analysis has been performed on the actual content of RE-related courses. In this paper, we survey what is taught in academia in RE-related courses. Our analysis is based on the data collected from more than 40 universities in the United States that offer a BS SWE. We show potential misalignments between what is offered by courses and industry needs, and we propose a research plan to further investigate this situation and to develop possible remedies for it.