REIM — An improvisation workshop format to train soft skill awareness

Abstract

Teaching requirements engineering (RE) often focuses on teaching factual knowledge such as how to write requirements, how to model the architecture, where and in which format to store the retrieved data? This is however only one side of the coin, working together is all about relationship between humans. In his daily work, requirements engineers face many situations where efficient communication is needed. We expect our requirements engineer to master the situations ”right”, expect him to act professionally. Looking at the situation for professional trainings for requirements engineers however, we often do not find a sound forum to train them. The training of these human factors or soft skills as we call them, is split up from the factual knowledge such as requirements engineering methods. To our knowledge, no approach exists, to combine the training of soft skills and factual RE knowledge into one training concept. This paper describes a workshop format which overcomes this situation and combines soft skills and factual RE knowledge into one training. We introduce the so-called REIM (Requirements Engineering and Improvisation) format. REIM utilizes a typical session of an improvisation theater course and extends it to the area of RE by using storytelling methods. This paper explains the main principle and elements of the workshop and provides an example for illustration. We conclude with lessons learned from already conducted workshops and outline next steps needed to validate the workshop's efficiency in a proper case study.