Requirements Analysis in Distributed Software Engineering Education – An Experience Report

In March 2001, two student teams, one in Melbourne, Australia, and one in Dortmund, Germany, started a common software engineering project to develop an electronic management tool for the support of scientific conferences. Both teams had to take part in all key activities of this project. The different deliverables had to be matched periodically in order to ensure the development of a common tool. In doing so, the teams had to deal with typical communication problems caused by different time zones, geographical distribution, language issues, and different approaches to requirements analysis. This paper presents the experiences and the lessons learned during requirements elicitation in the context of a distributed software engineering education project.