Moving Beyond the Classroom: Integrating Requirements Engineering Research & Education to Improve Practice

Requirements continue to be a major source of problems during development and maintenance of software-intensive systems. Requirements engineering researchers, educators, and practitioners seek to create, identify, and transfer solutions to these problems into practice. However, the lack of mechanisms to integrate these efforts negatively impacts their effectiveness in improving the state-of-thepractice. This paper is the first in a series of papers that proposes an intensive program of integrated research and education, embedded in practice, which has the likely outcome of making major progress towards the assimilation of the best new requirements engineering ideas into practice. The focus of this paper is on the educational aspects of this novel approach, which are designed to facilitate life-long learning and stimulate continuous improvement of requirements engineering practice.