Abstract:

In the context of Computer Science Engineering in Higher Education, Agility trends for software development have evolved at a high pace, being its related practices are still taught in the same courses as plan-driven approaches. Although core agile concepts of frameworks such as Scrum or DevOps are easy to understand, some values are not actually learned since they cannot be experienced from just a theoretical point of view, nor there is time for long term lab tasks in groups. Thus, gamification comes in handy here since some serious games can act as proxies for agile practices in just a few hours, helping students to internalize key values resulting from technical practices such as ‘transparency’, ‘empiricism’, ‘continuous integration’, ‘definition of done’, ‘shift-left’, etc,…

On the other hand, these games use to come with a cost which is not always straightforward justifiable following the standard budgeting policies of departments, and so sometimes this is the major impediment to embrace gamification in the classroom.

In the Computing Systems Department at University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM), a set of serious games were facilitated for Bachelor and Master students in the form of workshops: The Ball Game; Lego4Srum; Chocolate, Lego and DevOps; and Fear at the Workplace. A survey conducted after each workshop shows the need of this kind of experiences in order to really understand the benefits of agile concepts.

Keywords:

Agile, Scrum, DevOps, higher-education, software development, project management, serious games.