Gathering Project Requirements: A Collaborative And Interdisciplinary Experience

Milwaukee School of Engineering has one of the first ABET-accredited undergraduate software engineering (SE) programs in the United States. As part of the curriculum, SE students are exposed to Requirements Engineering (RE) in their junior year. These concepts are reinforced through a quarter-long project in which the SE student teams work with clients who have product domain knowledge but often no formal experience in RE. Working in unfamiliar domains, being cognizant of ethical issues, and having to deal with ambiguous and conflicting customer requirements are some of the challenges that students face in a course like this. The authors have been working on a collaborative experiment where the clients for the junior SE student teams are biomedical engineering (BE) student design teams. This allows interdisciplinary collaboration, exposes the SE students to eliciting requirements in an unfamiliar domain, and exposes the BE students to a formal requirements process. The authors discuss how this collaboration has evolved and what they learned from it. The challenges encountered while using this approach are also discussed.