Teaching requirements engineering with authentic stakeholders: Towards a scalable course setting

Enabling students to experience authentic stakeholder meetings as part of their requirements engineering education is a challenging task. To be authentic, involved stakeholders need to be affected by what students deliver. However, this is usually not the case. Trying to provide students authentic stakeholder interactions, we already specified two distinct settings suitable for recruiting real stakeholders by providing a benefit for them in return. However, scalability issues of these settings remained. In this paper, we present two ideas to overcome this issue. By cooperating with software companies which are building a product line, we gain access to many diverse stakeholders. Further, we propose to rely on course alumni to supervise stakeholder interactions to increase the scalability by reducing the lecturers´ supervision effort. These ideas are explained using a currently running course setting in collaboration with a software start-up which builds a product line of sports club management applications.