Do we need to teach testing skills in courses on requirements engineering and modelling?

It is commonly accepted that quality testing is the integral part of system engineering. Recent research highlights the need of shifting testing of a system to the earliest phases of engineering in order to reduce the number of errors resulting from miscommunicated and/or wrongly specified requirements. Information and Computer Science education might need to adapt to such needs. This paper explores the perspectives and benefits of testing-based teaching of requirements engineering. Model Driven Engineering (MDE) is known to promote the early testing perspective through fast prototyping of a prospective system contributing in this way to semantic validation of requirements. Our previous research presents empirically validated positive results on the learning effectiveness of model-based requirements engineering in combination with adapted MDE-prototyping method within an educational context to test the requirements and to test the requirements testability. Despite these positive results, our observation of the prototype testing patterns of novice analysts suggest that combining this prototype-based learning with the teaching of testing skills, such combined approach can result in even better learning outcomes.status: publishe