C-requirements specification teaching

Requirements elicitation, so directly related to the final success of a software project, is also a complex task. Requirement certification and validation need the customer and/or user's participation, for which reason software engineers must document the elicited requirements in a user-friendly format. The information, which clients find easier to understand, is gathered in a requirements catalog, usually written in natural language. This kind of requirements representation is often called customer oriented requirements or C-requirements. Usually, the teaching of the requirement-related topics is more concerned with requirement analysis, especially in modeling issues, than with the elicitation and C-requirements documentation process. This situation can produce misunderstandings and mistakes in students who try to carry out the requirements elicitation and documentation processes when they have to face a real or proposed software project. In this paper, we will describe a concrete requirements elicitation and documentation method that has been introduced to and accepted by students who take the software engineering subject as taught in the context of the computer science studies at the University of Salamanca (Spain).