Background & Rationale :
There is a long debate on which could be the best practice for realizing a learning organization. Every company would like to know more and more from its own past experiences and partly it happens. But when assessing a company, one of the results often found is the quite total absense of a real and effective knowledge management, with few experiential databases (with qualitative and/or quantitative data) shared and available to the organization, as requested for instance by SPI models such as CMMI as a fundamental pre-requisite for being appraised at ML3. A consequence is the large amount of whatever kind of estimations (effort, costs, # of expected defects, ...) done by experience (as in the "Delphi method") with few support from historical data.
So, the question should be: how to retain experience in an organization minimizing costs for training and related non-working time on billable activities and having at the same time the workforce happy and motivated?
During the '90s, important suggestions came from the work of Peter Senge and his "The Fifth Discipline", where these are systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, shared vision and team learning (the first three disciplines have particular application for the individual participant, and the last two have group application. Systems thinking has the distinction of being the "fifth discipline", because it serves to make the results of the other disciplines work together for business benefit.
But let's come back to the real life: another observation from the everyday life is that growing and becoming adults, we (averagely) reduce more and more our time devoted to playing whatever kind of games for ourselves enjoying (not for playing with our children and nephews): sports, table games, chess, etc (probably adults do not renounce so much to Nintendo's Playstation...). And it could be one possible reason for needing more time for learning new things, because we do not have fun for doing it, but it's a duty!
So, why do not applying those thoughts to technical issues such as (Software) Project Management and related areas (at least those defined as Knowledge Areas in the SWEBOK)?
Games on the Web & References :
The FASE (Forum for Advancing Software engineering Education) website, from 1991
The Frontiers in Education (FiE) Clearing House, with all the downloads to the FiE conferences papers (from 1995 on)
The CSEE&T (Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training) website
A series of useful links by INSEAD A series of links from the ProblemSetting.com website (in Italian)
Problems & Programmers, an educational software engineering card game by A.Baker, A.van der Hoek & E.Navarro
SimSE, an educational software engineering simulation environment whose goal is to bridge the gap between the large amount of conceptual software engineering knowledge given to students in lectures and the comparably small amount of this they actually get to put into practice in an associated "toy" software engineering project by E.Navarro & A.van der Hoek
eXtremeProgramming Simulations (PairDraw, ScreenTest)
eXtremeProgramming Playing Cards, for playing several games (i.e. Explanation, Showdown, Retrospective Roulette, Value Square, XP War, etc...)
Design Patterns Playing Cards, for playing several games (i.e. Patterns Poker, Name that Pattern, Patterns Cocktail, etc...)
Tomasz Okborg's Master Thesis (2003) on the "Evaluation of a simulation game that illustrates the software development process" A paper on ExtremeProgramming for Software Engineering Education, presented at the 31th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers on Software in Education Conference, 2001
A series of experiential learning games under the Tasty Cupcakes label, classified into four main classes: Physical, Emotional, Impressional, and Other.
:
Project-o-poly
The FASE (Forum for Advancing Software engineering Education) website, from 1991
[QEST & LIME models]
[Presentations]
[Links]
