A serious game to support the ISO 21500 standard education in the context of software project management
Introduction
Software engineering is a complex activity that requires a good integration of theoretical and practical information in order to create quality software [1]. To facilitate this activity, the software industry defines standards that provide guidance and processes with the goal of structuring the activities and tasks for supporting the development of software and systems. Within this discipline, software project management (SPM) consists of applying knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to software project activities in order to meet project requirements [2].
SPM is an important discipline for succeeding in the development of quality software [3]. Although there are many international standards that provide best practices, guidance and support SPM such as the ISO/IEC 12207 [4] or the ISO/IEC 29110 [5] and project management in general such as ISO 21500 [6], we can observe a crucial need for better understanding and training in these standards [7]. Thus, practitioners need to be involved in a practical and realistic learning/teaching process that allows them acquiring real-life experience in software processes, so that they can get enough experience to produce more quality software [8].
The need for supporting SPM, software processes and software process standards education, together with the advances in technology, move trainers towards the development and use of new methods and techniques to teach in a highly practical way, promote active and interactive learning, increase the motivation and engagement of learners and design new training strategies to train better-skilled and qualified software practitioners [9]. In this context, gamification and simulation-based serious games (SGs) are approaches that can help to overcome the lack of practical training in this field. Their use may offer an alternative to the traditional pedagogical approaches that could ease the integration of technological resources into new, practical, social, fun and effective learning activities, allowing learners, at the same time, to learn from their own mistakes and acquire experience in a risk-free environment [10].
The ISO 21500 standard is a basic guidance for project management that can be applied in the context of SPM. However, there is a lack of works for understanding, teaching or supporting the education of the project management processes of the ISO 21500 standard. For that reason, this paper makes the following contributions to the ISO 21500 standard education domain:
- a)
It provides a complete view of the current studies related to the use of SGs for understanding, teaching or supporting the education of the ISO 21500 standard.
- b)
It analyzes the coverage of the project management processes of the ISO 21500 standard by the gameplay's lifecycle process of ProDec, a proposed SG in the context of SPM.
- c)
It evaluates the educational effectiveness of ProDec as a learning resource for supporting the education of the ISO 21500 standard in the context of software projects.
The structure of the paper is as follows: Section 2 introduces the background of this work. Section 3 analyzes the works related to our proposal. Section 4 provides a complete view of the current studies related to the use of SGs for teaching ISO 21500 standard. Section 5 describes the main features of the learning resource ProDec. Section 6 evaluates ProDec's coverage of the project management processes of the ISO 21500 in the context of software projects. Section 7 analyzes the results of the educational effectiveness of our proposal. Section 8 shows the main threats found to the validity of this work. Finally, Section 9 summarizes the main contributions of our paper, draws our conclusions and describes our future work.
Section snippets
Background
Several organizations have published best practices and standards to provide guidance and describe processes for supporting project management. For instance, the PRINCE2 method defined by AXELOS [11], the PMBOK guide proposed by the Project Management Institute (PMI) [2], the Individual Competence Baseline designed by the International Project Management Association (IPMA) [12] or the ISO 21500 standard [6]. In this work, we have selected to take the guidance and processes provided by ISO 21500
Related works
A Multivocal Literature Review (MLR) [23] is a method used for identifying, analyzing and interpreting all available research relevant to a particular topic, in which all the literature related to a specific knowledge scope is collected from the scientific and grey literature with the goal of observing its state of art. The grey literature refers to the body of material not subject to traditional academic peer-review processes, opposite to the scientific literature that includes the body of
Overview of SGs for ISO 21500 education
The main purpose of our MLR is to provide an overview and characterize the state of the art related to the use of SGs for understanding, teaching or supporting the education of the ISO 21500 standard. Our goal is to identify the current SGs within the scope and their main features, as well as identifying new research opportunities. For that reason, this study has been performed as a MLR based on the procedure proposed in Calderon et al. [26]. In the following sub-sections, we describe the
The learning resource: ProDec
ProDec [30] is a simulation-based SG to train and motivate in learning, understanding and practicing the principles of SPM. As a learning resource, its main goal is that players put into practice their knowledge related to the concepts and practices of SPM in a risk-free virtual environment where they take the role of a project manager.
Regarding its main functionalities we can highlight that ProDec: (a) provides a training environment that allows learners to take contact with all the software
Coverage of ISO 21500 standard
In this work, we applied the guidelines of the ISO 21500 in the context of SPM with the goal of observing how ProDec can support the understanding and teaching of project management processes in software education. For that, in this section, we describe the main functionalities of ProDec related to the process and subject groups of the ISO 21500 and discuss how ProDec covers the different processes identified by the ISO 21500.
Assessment of ProDec
In order to teach SPM in a highly practical way and assess the educational effectiveness of ProDec as a resource tool for understanding and supporting the education of the standard ISO 21500 in the context of software projects, we have undertaken an empirical evaluation within the SPM course given at the University of Cadiz.
Threats to validity
It is necessary to consider certain issues that may threaten the validity of this work. Considering the conducted MLR, as with all literature reviews, this study has several factors that may affect its validity such as the search process, the resources for collecting the grey literature, the process for selecting the final primary studies, the human resources involved in the MLR or the information extracted from the primary studies. In order to deal with these possible threats, we have followed
Conclusions
As a generic standard that recommends best practices in project management, ISO 21500 should be considered in any project management curricula. However, we can observe a lack of works for understanding, teaching or supporting the ISO 21500 standard education in a more practical and realistic approach that allow learners put into practice their knowledge acquisition within real-life scenarios.
This paper aims to support this field providing the following contributions:
- ■
An overview of the state of
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the students and professors of the subject SPM held at the University of Cadiz during the course 2016/2017 for their participation.
This work has been carried out during a predoctoral contract, funded by the Program of Promotion and Impulse of Research and Transfer at the University of Cádiz 2018-2019. This work was funded by the Spanish National Research Agency (AEI) with ERDF funds under projects BadgePeople (TIN2016-76956-C3-3-R) and the Andalusian Plan for Research,
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