INTEGRATING  ROLE-PLAY INTO SOFTWARE ENGINEERING COURSES

Tyson R. Henry, Janine LaFrance
Department of Computer Science
California State University, Chico
tyson@ecst.csuchico.edu
janine@ecst.csuchico.edu

ABSTRACT
The primary goal of an introductory software engineering course is to provide a complete introduction to software engineering.  Typically this includes concepts, terms, processes, tools, and history.  However, for students to fully understand software engineering and be prepared for software development careers, courses must also consider the sociological and communication aspects, often called the socio-technical aspects.  Unfortunately, these aspects are difficult to teach and do not receive much coverage in the most widely used software engineering textbooks.  Faculty have used various approaches to address the socio-technical aspects.  One popular method is to use role-playing exercises.  The software engineering education literature contains many papers advocating role-play.  However, these papers describe role-play integrated in semester-long projects and often provide little detail about the exercises.  Using these published approaches in an existing software engineering course requires significant work by the instructor.  This paper presents a set of ready to use role-play exercises that can be downloaded and easily integrated into an existing course.  Student reaction is also reported.

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This paper to appear in Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, 2006.  The full text for this paper will be available on the ACM Digital Library sometime after October 2006.