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

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.