What is it about?
Software project management covers planning, running, monitoring, and closing software projects. Risk management is a key part of it: it helps teams react to unexpected events that often affect software projects. Teaching it well is important, but it is hard to do with lectures alone. In this paper, we present SERGE, a serious game that involves students in risk management through gamification and the simulation of a real-world project. We chose the features of the game through a literature review, and we refined its design over several build-and-test cycles. Then we ran a controlled experiment to compare the skills students gained with a traditional lecture and with SERGE.
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Why is it important?
Our results show that a serious game like SERGE, which involves students actively, can improve how they acquire risk management skills. This suggests that games can be a useful complement to lectures when teaching software project management.
Perspectives
Risk management is hard to teach with lectures alone, because students rarely see risks happen. With SERGE, we let students experience risks in a simulated project through a serious game. Our experiment suggests that the game can improve how students acquire these skills compared with a traditional lecture, and I hope teachers of software project management find it useful.
Prof. Stefano Lambiase
Aalborg Universitet
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: SERGE – Serious Game for the Education of Risk Management in Software Project Management, April 2024, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3639474.3640085.
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