Incorporating Quality Assurance Processes into Requirements Analysis Education

The traditional thrust of software quality assurance has been to use "brute force" testing at the end of development. However empirical studies have shown that moving quality assurance effort up to the early phases of development is an order of magnitude more cost effective than testing done at the end of development. In order to achieve a change in software development practices, skills for quality assuring conceptual models need to be taught in undergraduate software engineering programmes. This paper describes the introduction of quality reviews as a learning exercise in an undergraduate requirements analysis course, and evaluates the effectiveness of this in improving learning. In the (surprising) absence of any standard instrument for evaluating learning effectiveness, we developed a survey instrument called the Learning Effectiveness Survey. Using this instrument, learning effectiveness is evaluated in the context of the learning goals of the course (short term learning), and in the context of the broader educational programme and future working life (long term learning). It also provides feedback on the learning intervention and how it could be improved. This instrument provides a general tool for evaluating the effectiveness of learning interventions, and represents one of the major contributions of this paper.