Teaching Oral Communication Techniques in RE by Student-Student Role Play: Initial Experiences

In the early phases of software development, such as problem analysis and requirements engineering, oral communication techniques play a central part. In many university education programmes, however, such oral communication techniques are often addressed only superficially. Part of the reason may be that they are costly to teach and assess in a more elaborate way, while written assignments are much more easily administered to a large class. In the graduate course TDT4250 Modeling of Information Systems at the NTNU, we attempted to address oral communication skills by delegating to the students to role-play both as analysts and customers, and to have them peer-assess each other's analyst performances. The learning intervention received encouraging ratings from the students in a post-task survey, indicating several interesting observations as well as ideas for further improvement