LAURA: Let’s Arrange User Requirements Accurately

One of the most important skills in software engineering is the ability to specify clear unambiguous requirements. Students in the software engineering degree program at the University of Guayaquil present difficulties in describing user requirements (without using technical words) in an unambiguous manner. Thus, the present work proposes a serious game called LAURA (which is the acrostic of “Let’s Arrange User Requirements Accurately”) to support software engineering students in developing their ability to specify unambiguous user requirements in natural language. LAURA has been conceived following the EMERGO methodology. To evaluate the effectiveness of the game when improving the students’ specifications and to collect their perceptions about the learning experience, we performed an experiment with 64 participants, who were divided into two groups: one that used the game and one that received a traditional training session. It reports that both groups improved their ability to specify unambiguous functional user requirements after the training sessions. However, the game group showed a higher preference for the activity experience and learning experience, considering LAURA as a game that stimulates their learning, maintaining attention with non-tense interactions, and recognizing it as a tool for learning to specify unambiguous user requirements. All in all, the experiment demonstrates that the proposed LAURA serious game can be a useful learning tool that produces learning results similar to those obtained with blackboard class while improving its requirement specifications in an interactive way.