To Game or Not to Game?

by Christiane Gresse von Wangenheim and Forrest Shull

One challenge in software engineering education is to give students sufficient hands-on experience in actually building software. This is necessary so that students can understand which practices and techniques are useful in various situations. Many curricula do include a team project, in which students must interact to build a nontrivial software application. However, students have only so much leeway to try different approaches in the one or at most two semesters normally given for such projects (at least in our experience). What's often lost is the ability to learn by failure—that is, the important educational insight that comes from applying a suboptimal approach (say, deciding not to use configuration management in order to save time) and then experiencing the downstream repercussions. Instructors usually require students to apply software engineering practices, but—not having the time to recover from failures—those students experience the cost of the additional rigor but not the more-costly failures that they might have avoided.

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