Board Game as a Tool to Teach Software Engineering Concept -- Technical Debt

Abstract

The existing method of teaching software engineering subjects is severely limited by scope, time and exposure to real world settings. As a result of which the significance of Software Development Processes (SDP) is not very well appreciated by students. Technical debt is the debt that the project incurs by missing any process/activity in the SDP. The idea of this paper is to impart the concept of technical debt in a real world setting to students through the board game "Hard Choices". The board game Hard Choices developed by SEI, at Carnegie Mellon University is available under creative commons license. Additionally, this paper evaluates the effectiveness of this board game to communicate the concept of technical debt. During the course of the experiment we observed that students: (i) attached importance to SDP, (ii) understood the consequence of skipping a step in SDP. The above observations stem from the comparison of scores of pre and post test which show that after the conduct of the board game the scores obtained in post-test were significantly higher at 95% confidence levels (t-test paired two sample for means). Additionally a Likert questionnaire analysis also revealed that the students perceived the instruction methodology of using board games to be lucid and engaging.