Inspectors Academy: Pedagogical Design for Requirements Inspection Training - Educational Material

This training package includes all the educational materials needed to teach and train students in requirements inspections. The material is associated with the paper "Inspectors Academy: Pedagogical Design for Requirements Inspection Training" from Muneera Bano, Didar Zowghi, Alessio Ferrari, and Paola Spoletini, submitted to the 28th IEEE Requirements Engineering Conference (RE'20). 

NOTE: This package does not contain the data used in the analysis presented in the paper since the raw data cannot be shared for ethical reasons and the resulting codes are reported in the paper.

The proposed approach for teaching requirements inspection includes:

• a preliminary 2-hours’ lecture about requirements validation in general, and formal inspection in particular;
• two (one-hour session) tutorials on requirements inspection where students are first presented with examples of some types of defects [1] and then participate in the exercise of finding defects in a very small SRS using checklists;
• an hands-on assessment task in which students work in groups and are asked to perform a formal inspection meeting process and its related tasks as a method for requirements validation. As output of this task students are required to provide all the forms used in the inspection and the inspection report, which describes the followed inspection process, key findings and defect lists, reflection on the process and discussion of insights gained, both on the SRS and the nature of the inspection process.

  
The package includes all the material to carry out the activity, including the rubric to evaluate the assessment task.
In particular, it includes the following files:

1. LectureOutline.pdf: the outline of the content of the preliminary 2-hours' lecture; 
2. TutorialActivity.pdf: description of the tutorial activity; 
3. Tutorial_SRS_SkiResort.pdf: example of small SRS for the tutorial activity (instructors can use a different one, if they wish so);
4. Tutorial_SkiResortUseCases.pdf: use cases of the example presented in Tutorial_SRS_SkiResort.pdf;
5. InspectionAssignment_Decription.pdf: description of the assessment activity provided to the students: 
6. NancySalon.pdf: example of product description that can be used for the assessment activity [2]. 
7. InspectionAssignment_Rubric.pdf: rubric used to evaluate the assessment activity;
8. SRSAssignment_Rubric.pdf: rubric used to evaluate the SRS provided to the groups for the assessment activity.

[1] In the original settings, examples from pag. 99 of the the first edition of the book book "Requirements Engineering: Processes and Techniques" by Kotonya and Somerville were used. 

[2] If the material is used within a semester-long collaborative set of activities, the instructor can provide two project's descriptions at the beginning of the semester (half of the groups work on one and the other half on the other) and use the SRS of a group as document to inspect for another, by making sure that each group inspect an SRS of a project different from the one they develop the SRS for. However, this educational training can also be used as stand-alone activity. In this case, the instructor has to develop the SRS provided to the groups.