Work in Progress: On Teaching Requirements in Engineering Design

Engineering design is comprised of open-ended and ill-structured problems where the nature of tasks changes as progress is made. To effectively address these challenges, learners must build knowledge, skills and abilities in problem identification and articulation as well as problem solving. The early phases of design, when the need is clarified and objectives are set, are critical and mishandling them is a leading cause of project failure. When developing requirements, engineers must communicate with a wide variety of stakeholders to understand and document their needs, then synthesize these to a set of specifications for the system to be designed. These specifications or requirements are often the basis for project planning and are used as metrics to evaluate and select design concepts, therefore mistakes and errors at this stage have significant repercussions. However, industry reports on the skillsets of new engineering graduates entering the workforce emphasize a lack of communication skills, especially with nontechnical audiences. Without receiving significant training in early design phases such as requirements development, novice designers tend to skip directly to attempting to solve a problem without first seeking to understand it by gathering information and other resources to adequately frame the challenge. Unfortunately, the project-based learning pedagogies which are used to teach engineering design often bypass these early phases as open-ended projects may not stay aligned to the learning objectives of the course. To better prepare graduates, engineering design courses should provide learners with opportunities to practice requirements development and to engage meaningfully in the social and communicative aspects of design. This paper presents findings from a review of literature that discusses requirements development and associated pedagogies and combines various perspectives from systems engineering, software engineering, human-centered design and design thinking, and others. Insights from this literature review are used to highlight gaps and opportunities to support teaching and assessing requirements development in undergraduate engineering design.