Training Students as Agile Developers: Team and Role Building Games

Abstract

Computational Thinking is a skill related to problem solving: it is the competence necessary for applying, assessing, producing an algorithmic solution, and implementing it. Agile values and principles are both an ethic framework and a practical reference for teams of contemporary software developers. We study the combination of Computational Thinking competence with Agile values and principles: we have called the result of this combination Cooperative Thinking. Our hypothesis is that the practice of Cooperative Thinking is especially important for students and practitioners who will work in software development teams. Individual productivity in agile software projects is less important than team productivity, which in turn is influenced by team dynamics. In this paper we describe an approach to practicing Cooperative Thinking that we are experimenting, consisting in coaching groups of developers using team-building games, some well known, some invented ad hoc. We discuss the topic of team building by serious games; we show how to evaluate the performance of a team engaged in playing games to train themselves as agile software developers. We will distinguish games playable online from other games, as during the pandemic we were compelled to organize team building tasks online only. We have developed a GQM schema to evaluate the teamwork during a game involving cooperative thinking.