SimSE: a software engineering simulation environment for software process education

Abstract

The typical software engineering education lacks a practical treatment of the processes of software engineering—students are presented with relevant process theory in lectures, but have only limited opportunity to put these concepts into practice in an associated class project. Simulation is a powerful educational tool that is commonly used to teach processes that are infeasible to practice in the real world. The work described in this dissertation is based on the hypothesis that simulation can bring to software engineering education the same kinds of benefits that it has brought to other domains. In particular, we believe that software process education can be improved by allowing students to practice, through a simulator, the activity of managing different kinds of quasi-realistic software engineering processes.