Requirements engineering (RE) continues to face challenges, thereby raising issues for requirements engineering education (REE). In this paper, the authors present an interesting REE mapping study and recommendations to improve REE. This well-written study begins with the identification and selection of papers on REE. It performs a systematic mapping process to classify the selected papers and ranks them by quality measures. Validity risks are identified and addressed. Recommendations for improving REE, a summary of the state of REE, and future work conclude the paper.

Since the recommendations originate in the literature, they are not new, but the mapping provides a formal justification for them. The paper contains information that is generally useful: an extensive REE bibliography, and references to model curricula, bodies of knowledge, standards, and Google Scholar, which may not be well known. The formal research methodology used in the study could be used to help improve the teaching of any discipline. Thus, the paper will be of interest to requirements engineers, requirements engineering instructors, software engineers, project managers, teachers, course assessors, and instructional designers.

For future work, the authors plan a systematic REE literature review. The challenges to requirements engineering apply, as well, to REE requirements. Since the literature sample in the study was constrained to the REE domain, will the requirements based on the recommendations be complete? Should the search strings used in future work allow larger samples to include important relevant literature from other domains to derive a more complete set of requirements for RE education?