Applying competitive bidding games in software process education

In order to enhance the understanding of important concepts and strengthen the awareness of software process, students need to learn from their experiences in process-specific project practices. However, it´s often difficult to design and carry out such practices in tertiary education environment. Typical challenges may include: 1) the difficulty to separate process-specific project practices from other (e.g., technical) practices in a software project, which may result in students paying more attention on technical aspects than process-specific aspects. 2) The limitation of a habitual technical-alone perspective may neglect concerns of other project stakeholders (e.g., project owner). We designed a special project-practicing course in Nanjing University as an attempt to solve these issues. The course is composed of 6-hour lecture and 32-hour bidding game. We found several positive results with this new education approach on process-specific practicing course. For example, it was short and flexible, which is easy to be placed in a regular semester. Besides, students were also forced to pay close attention only to process-specific aspects of the practice project. What´s more, students were able to think from different perspectives, e.g., the senior management and customers.