Global Manager: A serious game to help to be aware of the challenges of being a project manager on Global Software Development
🔗 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3592620
Project managers tend to confront multiple challenges in Global Software Development (GSD), including misunderstandings about the project requirements, complex estimations of costs, risks and efforts, along with increases in task allocation and a lack of coordination. “Soft skills” play a fundamental role in solving these challenges, as they are the human or social abilities that facilitate the resolution of conflicts and involve dealing with people and managing projects in their most social and creative dimension. However, developing the soft skills that allow project managers to lead in an effective manner is not an easy task, especially in global or distributed environments, where coordination and control problems are commonplace. One suitable mechanism with which to develop these soft skills is that of serious games, which focus on learning by doing and allow users to simulate real scenarios. The authors of this paper are aware of the usefulness of this type of teaching method and have, therefore, developed the serious game described herein. This serious game is denominated as Global Manager and is focused on helping both students and novice project managers to become aware of the factors that may affect GSD projects. Global Manager was evaluated by means of a quasi-experiment based on a pretest-posttest design, which was used in order to assess whether the game can increase the players’ awareness and knowledge of the factors that a project manager should consider in GSD projects. The results obtained after evaluating the game were quite satisfactory, as the game taught the players to differentiate between global and distributed software projects, and to experience situations that may and do occur in these settings. Furthermore, Global Manager helped improve players' perceptions of the importance of different influencing factors in GSD.
Global Software Development, Distributed Software Development, Project Management, Serious games
@article{vizcaino2023global,
title={Global manager: a serious game to raise awareness of the challenges of being a project manager in global software development},
author={Vizca{\'\i}no, Aurora and Garc{\'\i}a, F{\'e}lix O and Men{\'e}ndez, V{\'\i}ctor Hugo and Manjavacas, Antonio and M{\'a}rquez, Rub{\'e}n and Molina, Marta},
journal={ACM Transactions on Computing Education},
volume={23},
number={2},
pages={1--31},
year={2023},
publisher={ACM New York, NY},
doi={10.1145/3592620}
}
This work has been supported by the projects: OASSIS (PID2021-122554OB-C31, funded by MCIN/ AEI /10.13039/501100011033 / FEDER, EU); and EMMA (Evaluation and Improvement of the Environmental Sustainability of Applications), SBPLY/21/180501/000115, funded by the Consejería de Educación, Cultura y Deportes de la Junta de Comunidades de Castilla La Mancha and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional FEDER (Programa Operativo de Castilla-La Mancha 2021-2027). We would like to thank all the students and practitioners who took part in preparing the evaluation of Global Manager and all those involved in the evaluation of the game. Without their collaboration, this paper would not have been possible.