Teaching Software Development by Means of a Classroom Game: The Software Development Game

Software development is not only a matter of information technology teams: business stakeholders can be involved in this task at various stages. In addition, Software Engineering has been traditionally taught to people, both technical and non-technical, by means of regular and well-known methods, but some other teaching strategies have been left out—games, case studies, forums, and so forth—that could be applicable to Software Engineering. There are some examples of these alternative methods being employed in sciences like management, medicine, and law. However, for teaching Software Engineering, these strategies are still not applied. We propose in this paper the software development game, a strategy for teaching university students the dynamics of a software project. Also, we summarize the results of the application of the game to experimental subjects.

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