Software engineering: the art of the user interview

Reviewer: Herbert A. Klaeren

It is a well-known fact that the quality of a system can only be judged on the basis of a requirements specification for that system. Every system development starts, therefore, with the creation of such a specification. Generally, this involves asking the (future) users of the system for details about the requirements. However, these users speak a different language from the software professionals, or sometimes are not even willing to cooperate with them. This paper reports on 21-2- years of experience with an undergraduate classroom exercise which is meant to give students a relatively realistic idea of what they can expect from a user. In this course, faculty members take the role of users in an interview the students must conduct. They try to simulate certain problem areas, such as the difficulty of communicating, user incompetence or even hostility, contradictory specifications, etc. The paper is quite amusing to read, although the phenomena treated are rather obvious. The students seem to like this exercise very much because it gives them a feeling of “real life.”