Teaching Software Engineering Project Management – A Novel Approach for Software Engineering Programs

Craig Caulfield,Stanislaw Paul Maj,David Veal

doi:10.5539/mas.v5n5p87

Abstract

In response to real and perceived short-comings in the quality and productivity of software engineering practices and projects, professionally-endorsed graduate and post-graduate curriculum guides have been developed to meet technical developments and evolving industry demands. Each of these curriculum guidelines identifies better software project management skills as critical for all graduating students, but they provide little guidance on how to achieve this. One possible way is to use a serious game — a game designed to teach and educate players about some of the dynamic complexities of the field in a safe and inexpensive environment. This paper presents the results of a qualitative research project that used a simple game of a software project to see if and how games could contribute to better software project management education. Initial results suggest that suitably-designed games are able to teach software engineering and project management concepts at higher-order Bloom taxonomy levels.

Highlights

1.1 Background and SignificanceIn 1968 and 1969 NATO convened conferences of computer industry representatives and academics to help address what was seen as a growing gap between what was generally hoped for in complex software systems and what was achieved (Buxton & Randell, 1970; Naur & Randell, 1969)
The purpose of this paper is to explore one way of tackling some of these issues by using a serious game— a game designed to teach and educate players about some of the dynamic complexities software development
The preliminary results of this research project suggest that Simsoft meets the criteria of the higher-order Bloom taxonomy levels of analysis, synthesis and evaluation and as such could be used as a viable teaching approach by the IS2010 curriculum

Summary

Introduction

Given that software development projects are complex socio-technical systems arguably what is needed is an instructional method that provides students with an opportunity to experience the dynamics of a software project in something akin to a real-world environment. This experience needs to demonstrate how a project can rapidly escalate out of control, for example through Brooks’ Law, even though seemingly sensible decisions have been made. There is a story of a young IBM executive whose innocent mistake caused a $10 million loss for the company. “You must be kidding! We’ve just spent ten million dollars training you” (Awad & Ghaziri, 2008, p. 281)

Objectives

Results

Conclusion