Partnering with and assisting community partners in service-learning projects to tailor and articulate project requirements

In a software engineering course, service-learning software projects for real-world clients help motivate students, provide them with opportunities to work on complex problems, and expose them to the difficult but important problem of communicating with clients. The diverse backgrounds and needs of the community partners in these service-learning projects, however, entail that careful preparation be done to ensure that students have a rich, exciting, challenging, fulfilling, and educating experience. One key aspect of this preparation is to work with and assist community partners to tailor and articulate project requirements that are concrete and appropriate for a software engineering course. We developed a systematic approach to classify community partners, and to select and organize requirements. Outcomes of our student service-learning projects showed that our approach was effective