URL study guide

https://studiegids.vu.nl/en/courses/2025-2026/XB_0032

Course Objective

In this course, you will learn about requirements engineering practices for eliciting, documenting, and managing requirements (Knowledge and understanding). Through theory and hands-on exercises, you will gain insights into how these practices can be applied during software development (Applying knowledge and understanding). Additionally, you will learn about different software lifecycle models and how requirements engineering activities fit into these models (Knowledge and understanding) (Applying knowledge and understanding). After following the course, you will be able to reason and make decisions about adequate requirements engineering elicitation, documentation, and management techniques taking into consideration specific software project characteristics (Making judgements). Additionally, you will be able to apply these techniques in concrete project examples. (Applying knowledge and understanding) (Lifelong learning skills)

Course Content

A good requirements specification is critical for software project success. This course gives an introduction to processes, methods, and representation forms for specifying and managing requirements. It also gives an overview of the whole software development lifecycle. Topics include requirements elicitation, analysis, modeling, and validation. Current research topics such as continuous user participation and requirements mining will also be covered. Part of the course entails assignments performed in groups and individual non-graded exercises.

Teaching Methods

The course will be composed of theoretical lectures and practicals in which individual exercises will be solved by students and discussed.

Method of Assessment

Assignments (group): 70% Final written exam (individual): 30% Quizzes (individual): pass/fail There is a resit for the final written exam. There are no resits for any of the graded assignments or quizzes. Note: should the lecture be given partially online (more than two theoretical lectures), the assignments will count for a 100% of the grade and the final written exam will be in a pass-fail modality.

Literature

Selected chapters (to be announced in lecture) of the following books: Mandatory (We will only read specific chapters from this book; please, wait for the first lecture to decide if you should buy the book):Requirements Engineering, Axel van Lamsweerde, Wiley, 2009.Selected chapters of the following books (available in Canvas):Karl Wiegers and Joy Beatty
, Software Requirements, Microsoft Press, 2013.Martina Seidl, Marion Scholz, Christian Huemer, Gerti Kappel, UML@Classroom: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Modeling, Springer, 2015.Bernd Brügge and Allen H. Dutoit, Object-Oriented Software Engineering, Pearson, 2010.

Target Audience

Bachelor Computer Science (year 1) and pre-master students of Information Science

Recommended background knowledge

Basic programming experience. Some knowledge about the software lifecycle is of advantage.
Academic year1/09/2531/08/26
Course level6.00 EC

Language of Tuition

  • English

Study type

  • Premaster
  • Bachelor