Requirements Engineering

Course manual 2025/2026

Course content

At the heart Requirements Engineering is making decisions about what system to make (or use). Agile methods emphasize that a lot of decisions like those on user stories can be taken throughout the engineering process. It's hard to get valid output by doing   requirements engineering. In the agile mantra there is a strong sense that we can only learn what a good system is by putting the software out there and see if it delivers value. However this requires that you can run good experiments and that the costs of failing are acceptable. If that is not the case, then we have to find other ways to learn to have a good chance on success. How to do that is part of this course. 

This interactive course explores requirement engineering approaches and pitfalls by discussing real life cases. You will dive into  psychological and philosophical sources. It will make you see why our initial ideas about what we need are often seriously flawed and why our requirements and design methods fall short.  It will also help give you pointers on how to discover the needs, translate these into designs and how to setup experiments to learn if the system delivers value.  

Throughout the course there will be a lot of focus on practicing soft skills like interviewing.

Study materials

Literature

• D. Kahneman 'Noise: a flaw in human judgement."

Objectives

• The student can explain why organizational and stakeholder needs are hard to express, capture and understand
• The student can explain shortcomings in the (agile) methods and best practices that are widely used
• The student can apply knowledge gathering and system modeling techniques 

Teaching methods

• Lecture
• Seminar
• Fieldwork/excursion

In the lectures we will zoom in on real world cases and understand why requirements methods have a hard way coming up with valid output. We will also explore how these cases could have been analyzed better. 

In the workshops you will get instructions and a first practice with the techniques that you have to use in the case.

By working at the case you can try out practices and theory and see if you are able to get valuable findings in a real world context.

In the feedback sessions we will help you with the case. 

Learning activities

Attendance

Additional requirements for this course:

If you miss more than three organized activities without having made proper arrangements you are excluded from the course. 

Assessment

Fraud and plagiarism

The 'Regulations governing fraud and plagiarism for UvA students' applies to this course. This will be monitored carefully. Upon suspicion of fraud or plagiarism the Examinations Board of the programme will be informed. For the 'Regulations governing fraud and plagiarism for UvA students' see: www.student.uva.nl

Course structure

Additional information

Recommended prior knowledge: Knowledge of requirement engineering, for example books of Sommerville, Robertson, van Lamsweerde, Wiegers or Pohl. 'Modeling techniques', e.g. UML diagrams to describe software behaviour.

Contact information

Coordinator

• H.L. Dekkers

Staff

• M.E. Janeczko MSc
• Dr. Thomas van Binsbergen