A general framework for software project management simulation games

Typical education in management of software projects lacks practical experience. But experience is essential in under-standing the problems and especially their solutions. A real software project is difficult to practice because of its long duration and the potential of high damage if the project fails. Simulation games in a sandbox are a well-known approach for practicing complex content. But the design and development of such a game needs much knowledge about all the relevant processes that should be simulated. In this paper, we propose a general framework and a method that can be used for developing project management simulation games for an educational purpose in the software engineering domain. We developed a general simulation model including aspects of ergonomic analysis, work psychology, learning theory and software engineering. With this, we are able to simulate not only the working processes but also the character of the developers. It can be used without understanding the simulation model, so there is no need to understand all the complex content behind. Considering existing solutions, our approach supports different types of games, without making limitations to the game design. We show that with adequate abstraction there is no need to develop an own simulation model for each simulation game. Instead, all relevant aspects can be integrated in a general simulation model.