Teaching Requirements Engineering To the Bahá’í Students in Iran Who Are Denied of Higher Education Didar Zowghi Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology University of Technology, Sydney didar.zowghi@uts.edu.au Abstract The increasing interest in Requirements Engineering (RE) in recent years has motivated many academics to provide students with a broad knowledge of the fundamental principles of RE. In RE Education and Training (REET), it is imperative to cover a wide range of topics and teach a variety of skills. Major challenges of REET have already been well recognised and documented in the literature. Moreover, wide spread use of web-based education has caused an explosion of published literature related to distance education. When students are not collocated with the instructor and they themselves are geographically dispersed clearly exacerbates some of the well-known challenges of REET. In this paper I share the experiences gained in teaching an online postgraduate RE subject for the first time to students located in Iran. These students have been denied of basic human rights, specifically access to University education. I used role playing as a pedagogical tool to give students a greater appreciation of issues and problems associated with RE in quasi-real settings. This paper describes some of the challenges encountered and the lessons learnt with some suggestions on how to address, among other issues, the problem of distance between students and the instructor. Keywords: Requirements Engineering Education, Role Playing, distance education 1. Introduction Requirements engineering is recognised as a multi- disciplinary, human-centred and communication rich process in software development. The RE methods, techniques and approaches to date have drawn upon a variety of disciplines, and the requirements engineers are increasingly expected to be well versed with these disciplines [19]. Requirements engineers need to be able to communicate effectively with a wide range of people, with different backgrounds and personal goals frequently not good at articulating what they really want from a computer-based system. One of the fundamental RE-related problems faced by project teams is the communication barrier that exists between developers and customers. Often concepts and categories that are known to one community of participants can be entirely opaque to members of the other participants. The fact that this opacity exists is rarely noticed in the course of elicitation unless specific attention is paid to it. Requirements engineers must be able to speak to the customers about the problem that is being solved by a computer-based solution in a language that they can understand. Furthermore, they must be able to ask the participants the right questions at the right time during the course of elicitation to capture the real needs. Another important issue that requirements engineers face in practice is the ability to choose the most effective analysis and modelling techniques suited to solving the problem at hand. To be able to make such an informed decision, practitioners need to be familiar with a range of modelling and analysis techniques. Most of the modelling notations (e.g. UML) are commonly taught in universities and graduates from software engineering or computer science courses are expected to be fully familiar with analysis and modelling techniques. Finally, the poor quality of the end product of requirements engineering (i.e. systems requirements specifications, SRS) such as missing, ambiguously presented or misinterpreted information, poor representation, untestable statements of requirements and redundant information are among the most critical problems facing requirements engineers. Requirements engineers must have a range of writing skills such that they can produce precise, concise, consistent, clear and unambiguous statements of requirements. To cover all of the above skills adequately and in reasonable depth over one semester long RE university course given the limited time and available resources is very challenging. In 2002, I was motivated by this challenge to design and deliver such a subject for the first time to second year undergraduate students at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). The course 2009 Fourth International Workshop on Requirements Engineering Education and Training (REET'09) 978-0-7695-4103-7/10 $26.00 © 2010