Teaching motivational models in agile requirements engineering

Software engineering courses continually strive to maintain an excellent teaching curriculum that provides students with the agile skills as per industry needs. A particular challenge of teaching requirements engineering is capturing and communicating software requirements without killing team agility with excessive documentation. In many projects, requirements can be ambiguous and inconsistent. It is important to find a middle ground between completely by-passing requirements documentation and writing a complete Software Requirements Specification. In this paper, we report our experiences, presenting a guideline for students and educators who wish to adopt motivational modelling, a lightweight approach to requirements elicitation and modelling, for agile requirements engineering. Motivational modelling is an efficient technique that also represents a good boundary object to support discussions between developers and non-technical clients. Finally, we outline discussion points regarding where motivational models could fit into other agile practices.