Towards Fully-Traceable Human-Centred Design

Given the complexity and cost of modern software projects, employers want new hires to be skilled at documenting and verifying software requirements. However, anecdotally, final-year students do not believe these skills are as important as hard skills like programming, and as such do not focus on learning them. Following other researchers' leads, we believe infusing Design Thinking (DT) into a final-year software engineering Capstone course will help close the gap between student skills and employer demands. We propose a phenomenographic study to understand final-year students' experiences with requirements elicitation and traceability between design decisions and requirements. We plan to use the information gathered from this study to inform the design of a DT tool to help student teams capture project information and support end-to-end backward and forward traceability of design decisions. By finding ways to reduce friction in documenting and tracing requirements, we expect to see an increase in student engagement and better requirement and traceability outcomes than the traditional approach.