Making Explicit the Problem and Context to Address in Project-Based Software Engineering Courses

In project-based software engineering courses, development teams conformed by students explore the context and problem to address in their projects, before proposing any solution. The quality of this exploration, and the resulting output, usually make a difference on how quickly the development team identifies the goal and scope of the product to be developed. This exploration activity is usually complex and time consuming, since it requires dealing with uncertainties and misunderstandings between the development team and real or fictitious stakeholders. For that reason, the early exploration of the context and problem has been identified as a major and recurrent source of problems in software projects conducted in the industry and the academia. This paper presents an interactive visual tool that helps students explore the context and problem to address in project-based software engineering courses. The tool was used and evaluated by students from four different courses in two universities. According to the participants, the perceived usability and usefulness of the tool is high, surpassing the students' previous experiences when they used requirements engineering techniques for the same purpose.