Understanding the Decision-Making of Students in Requirements Engineering Course Projects

Decision-making is an essential part of Requirements Engineering (RE). RE can be considered as a decision-making process about the functionality and quality of the software product to be constructed. Decision-making behaviors in RE have a significant impact on the quality of requirements artifacts. Thus, it is critical to understand how stakeholders make decisions in RE. However, little empirical research has been conducted regarding decision-making in RE process. To this end, we conducted a study with 70 master students on software engineering in RE course projects. Through this study, we found that students rarely realized that they were making decisions in RE, but we identified how students made decisions in RE process by the questionnaires and work reports. We provided empirical evidence about how students made decisions in a complete RE project. Furthermore, we gained insight about the decision-making characteristics of students during requirements elicitation, analysis, validation, negotiation, and

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