Emerging Technologies in Requirements Elicitation Interview Training: Robotic and Virtual Tutors

[Context] Requirements elicitation interviews are the most widely used elicitation technique. The interviewer's preparedness and communication skills play an important role in the quality of interaction, therefore, the interview's success. Students can develop their skills through practice interviews. [Problem] Arranging practice interviews for many students is not scalable, as the involvement of a stakeholder in each interview requires a lot of time and effort. [Principal Idea] To address this problem, we propose REIT, an extensible architecture for Requirements Elicitation Interview Trainer system based on emerging technologies for education. It has two separate phases. The first is the interview phase, where the student acts as an interviewer and the system as an interviewee. The second is the feedback phase, where the system evaluates the student's performance and provides contextual and behavioral feedback to enhance their interviewing skills. [Results/Contribution] We demonstrate the applicability of REIT by implementing two instances: RoREIT with an embodied physical robotic agent and VoREIT with a virtual voice-only agent. We empirically evaluated these two instances with a target user group consisting of graduate students. The results reveal that the students appreciated both systems. The participants demonstrated higher learning gain when trained with RoREIT, but they found VoREIT more engaging and easier to use. These findings indicate that each system has its distinct benefits and drawbacks, suggesting that our generic architecture REIT can be configured for various educational settings based on preferences and available resources.