Using simulation games to teach global software engineering courses

Abstract

Global software engineering is a growing field of research. The ability to develop software at remote sites provides means to utilize talents and skills in different parts of the world. Organizations and companies benefit from such diverse pool of developers. Recently, global software engineering courses started to be popular in academic settings to prepare generations of developers who can function in a professional way in such distributed setting. Courses are normally offered as part of computer science or software engineering degrees. There are different challenges pertaining to team members, environment and the interlacing factors like time zones, cultural diversity of team members, location barriers and gender issues. Simulation games have been used to teach classical software engineering courses. Simulation games can be used to illustrate and experiment with concepts like team management, performance and tool selection. SimSE is an educational simulation tool that provides graphical simulation environment to help students to practice anticipated challenges during software development. In this paper, we propose a model for distributed global software development simulation games. The model includes factors like time zones, cultural diversity of users (mainly Hofstede's culture dimensions are used), location barriers and gender issues. These factors will result in game triggers that may affect the development of the virtual project. The model is then implemented using the SimSE model builder. The game will be illustrated showing how it can be used in teaching global software engineering courses. The results will be verified using existing models.