Software Project Management Game

Software	EITHER none OR an object-oriented language
Covers	Software development methodologies, large-scale project management, optionally design and development of an interactive system
Skills Required	Extensive knowledge of software project management, optionally programming
Challenge	Conceptual ???? Technical ?? Programming

Brief Description

The objective of this project is to design a game that models the different stages and tasks involved in organising and carrying out a large-scale software development project, such as developing a medical records information system for the NHS, and illustrates the challenges and pitfalls it involves. There are lots and lots of ways projects can go wrong, from having a team with the wrong range of personalities to misunderstanding essential requirements to not keeping track of the paperwork to not having a persuasive presentation ready for your next review.

You can approach this project in two ways: One is to focus on understanding the nature of big projects in detail, thinking about all their different aspects, and working out how they could all be represented in a game. By doing this well you could produce a good project without writing any code. The other (essential for meeting the requirements for Computer Science and Software Engineering degrees) is to design and build a game engine that has mechanisms for representing and processing the different aspects of project management that are involved in the game, and, ideally, an attractive and usable graphic interface. This could be an HTML interface for a game the users can run over the internet.

This project will involve thinking hard about formal software development methodologies and how they are applied (and deviated from) in real life, as well as about the nature of the problems that cause many projects to be massively late and over budget, and ultimately fail. You might want to restrict your scope to a single methodology such as Rational Unified Process, applied to a single class of problem like a corporate information system, but you should think about how you could design your game to model other kinds of project as well.

Variant

For a software engineer or business information systems specialist, the most obvious choice of domain for a project management game is developing software, especially big information systems. But you may prefer to take on some other kind of large-scale project management. But be warned: this project requires you to learn a lot about how project management really works in industry, and all the things that can go wrong.

Back to