Topic outline

  • General

    This course gives a broad understanding of requirements engineering (RE) and its role in system, product and digital service development. The roots of RE are from software engineering and software development. The purpose of RE is to ensure that the software system satisfies customer and user needs and the usage of the system provides value for customers and users.

    The key topics of the course are: 

      • the key RE activities and good RE practices
      • discovering user needs 
      • customer value creation and customer value evaluation 
      • linking RE with solution planning, roadmapping, and software development 
      • RE from the perspective of critical and creative thinking.

    After the course, you can explain what the key activities of requirements engineering mean in practice. You also learn to select good RE practices for development projects and you can relate RE to other processes such as solution planning, roadmapping, and customer value evaluation. You also learn to combine and apply different RE approaches when developing software-intensive products and digital services.

    CONTACT INFORMATION: If you have any questions or concerns, do not hesitate to contact the responsible teacher of the course (Marjo Kauppinen) by email (first name.surname@aalto.fi).

    Course staff


    MKomakuvaMarjo Kauppinen (Responsible teacher)
    Requirements engineering (RE) has been my passion for more than twenty years and it still is. I did my doctoral thesis on how organisations can improve their RE processes. Over the years, our research team have done collaboration with many companies and the results of this research work form the basis of this RE course. It has also been inspiring to follow how students have done their master’s thesis related to requirements engineering.
    Sari Kujala (Responsible teacher) 
    I am a senior university lecturer and I have been helping Marjo with this course since she started it. My research focus has been on identifying user needs, requirements elicitation, user-centered design, user experience, and eHealth. As I have a background in psychology, I will talk about creativity in addition to identifying hidden user needs and requirements elicitation.
    NagadivyaNagadivya Balasubramaniam (Teaching assistant)
    Hi! I’m Divya. I am currently pursuing Ph.D., and my research area is AI ethics and requirements engineering. In the research study, I am exploring how to incorporate ethics in requirements engineering. I have a Master's degree specialising in Service Design Engineering from Aalto University.