Design and Evaluation of an Educational Software Process Simulation Environment and Associated Model

Simulation is an educational tool that is commonly used to teach processes that are infeasible to practice in the real world. Software process education is a domain that has not yet taken full advantage of the benefits of simulation. To address this, we have developed SimSE, an educational, interactive, graphical environment for building and simulating software engineering processes in a game-like setting. We detail the design of SimSE, present an initial simulation model of a waterfall process that we developed, and describe an experiment that we conducted to evaluate the educational potential of SimSE and its initial model