Abstract
Inherent properties of games, such as rules, goals and interaction, have made them popular to address challenges and sort obstacles in a wide variety of contexts. Within Software Engineering, a challenging activity of the software development process is the Inception phase, in which stakeholders’ needs, required functionalities, objectives, risks and constraints of a software product are established. An alternative to optimize stakeholders’ participation during the Inception phase and make more efficient its outcomes is to do it through games.
Taking into account the uncommonness of games in Software Engineering development process and the lack of complex methods that include games, this paper presents ActiveAction, a method that combines classical requirements specification techniques with games. ActiveAction resulted in a successful game-based strategy that has improved the Inception phase of the software development projects based on the fact that stakeholders express their ideas freely in an unstressed environment; real-life scenarios are simulated to identify exceptions; requirements and risks are determined in a collaborative manner. It is concluded that the inclusion of games in such a challenging activity as software projects inception, is feasible and reported promising results that benefit both stakeholders and software developer organizations.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Miriam Eréndira Jiménez-Hernández and Roberto Azrael Medina-Díaz for on-site observation and initial analysis of the data.
This work has been funded by the GEODAS-BC project (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER), TIN2012-37493-C03-01); GLOBALIA project (Consejería de Educación, Ciencia y Cultura (Junta de Comunidades de Castilla — La Mancha) and FEDER, PEII11-0291-5274); SDGear project (TSI-100104-2014-4), framed under the ITEA 2 Call 7, and co-funded by “Ministerio de Industria, Energía y Turismo (Plan Nacional de Investigación Científica, Desarrollo e Innovación Tecnológica 2013-2016) and FEDER”; the Graduate Science and Engineering Computing (PCIC-UNAM) and the grant scholarship program of CONACYT.
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Morales-Trujillo, M.E., Oktaba, H., González, J.C. (2015). Taking Seriously Software Projects Inception Through Games. In: Maciaszek, L., Filipe, J. (eds) Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering. ENASE 2014. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 551. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27218-4_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27218-4_8
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