Teaching software project management by simulation — Experiences with a comprehensive model

Abstract

Students of software engineering very rarely have the opportunity to gather experience in leading projects. This not only restricts their management skills, but also prevents them from learning about the project manager's point of view. We consider this lack of experience a major flaw of software engineering education. In this paper, we describe an approach to educate software engineers by simulating a software project. Students became project leaders of our simulated project and had to finish this given project successfully. To reduce biases and obtain reproducible effects, we decided to use a simple, but quantitative mathematical model. This simple model turned out to be sufficient to an amazing extent: Many effects well-known from real projects arose during the simulation. The project managers made many characteristic errors which led to plausible project distortions. The evolution of the simulated projects provided valuable feedback to teachers and students. This model is one result of our long-term project SESAM.