Teaching to Think in Software Terms: An Interdisciplinary Graduate Software Requirement Engineering Course for AEC Students

Abstract

Software is no longer developed and discussed only by computer science majors. Software development and engineering is a professional concentration area in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) fields, among many others. Graduates of AEC related fields, who are motivated by problems which can be addressed better with computation or with better computation, often return to school to pursue graduate studies devoted to understanding computation of the professional problems they encounter. These students understand discipline specific issues in their fields well. However, in contrast to computer science majors, they lack techniques that can help them formulate solutions in software engineering terms. Asking such students to take classes from computer science curricula fosters interdisciplinary thinking; however, this practice fails to address the specialized computational needs of the AEC fields. An in depth understanding of how to use software development as a problem analysis approach can provide AEC students, both in the graduate and undergraduate levels, with problem classification techniques that they need. Here, we will describe our experience in introducing graduate AEC students to software requirement elicitation and development process techniques.