I have been teaching at various places, and I have been using a few different techniques. I had never used Role Playing teaching technique until yesterday. It was totally sudden and was never in the plan.
I was teaching Data warehousing and wanted to explain the difficulty in requirement elicitation for data warehousing. The whole idea was to tell students that due to the ad-hoc data analysis in data warehousing it is difficult to collect requirements.
Roles
This is a postgraduate course where participants have some level of industry experience. In the class, there was a person who was a Human Resources Manager from a software development organization and there were two Business Analysts. There were a few developers as well. I asked Human Resource Manager to come up with a scenario, and instantly, he decided on employee attrition which seems to be a headache for the software industry these days.
So two BA were asked to find requirements for attrition analysis. Both parties started the discussion and no one knew where to start and what is the direction. During the 5 - 10 minutes discussion, it was very clear that the discussion was not focused. After completing the requirement elicitation, I asked BA to explain the requirements to the developer. Even though it was done, I am pretty much sure that the developer will not be able to develop an analytical solution for attrition.
Then the second role-playing started. I asked the same BA team to capture requirements to implement an exit interview procedure. Then the BA team said that they can be a passive participant at the exit interview and they can collect exsitng document with related to the exit interviews. Then it was very clear that requirement capturing for that task is much simpler than the before task.
Experience Sharing
After the role playing was completed, I asked from each party, and the viewers' experience in the role playing. All agreed that requirement elicitation in analytical systems is difficult and needs more experience.
For me this was a new experience and it was sudden. Next time I need to plan for such events more methodically.
I am not sure whether they enjoyed, but I really did enjoy.
Theory Behind Role Playing Teaching Method
