Using students as subjects - an empirical evaluation

TLDR

Requirements engineering must decide which requirements to include in a release, a complex task that balances multiple perspectives. The study examines whether students perceive the same priorities as industry professionals in requirements selection and whether courses enable them to understand industry practice. Students demonstrate a good grasp of industry practices in requirements selection and can serve effectively as subjects in related empirical research.

Abstract

An important task in Requirements Engineering is to select which requirements that should go into a specific release of a system. This is a complex decision that requires balancing multiple perspectives against each other. In this article we investigate what students imagine is important to professionals in requirements selection. The reason for this is to understand whether the students are able to picture what industry professionals value, and whether the courses allow them to picture the state of industry practice. The results indicate that students have a good understanding of the way industry acts in the context of requirements selection, and students may work well as subjects in empirical studies in this area.