Employing software maintenance techniques via a tower-defense serious computer game

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of the stereotype which portrays a software engineer as one who spends his or her whole day in a cubicle programming. We present an interactive, real-time strategy, tower defense game, to help students ranging from middle school to college juniors learn about the maintenance phase of the software engineering life cycle. Specifically, our game educates students about the four forms of software maintenance: adaptive, corrective, perfective, and preventive. The important aspect of our game is that the student does not actually perform software maintenance, which could be an abstract and intimidating process. Instead, the student plays a real-time strategy, tower defense game which is appealing especially to a younger audience. The key is the student is still using the same strategies that would be used in a real software project to perform software maintenance to complete our game. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.