Software engineering (SE) teaching includes different strategies such as project-based learning, collaborative learning, simulations, and case methods, among others, seeking to balance theory and practice and encourage teamwork. However, although some repositories of teaching practices are identified, each SE teacher incorporates different strategies/practices either barely documented or subjectively represented. The latter hinders the transfer of knowledge among the software engineering education community. Therefore, in this paper we propose SETMAT (Software Engineering Teaching Methods and Theory), a descriptive theory of SE education offering a common conceptual framework for representing software engineering teaching practices, and we also describe a pilot with teachers from Colombia, Chile, and Mexico where they represented and socialized their SE teaching practices in SETMAT. This pilot proves the usage of SETMAT for representing teaching practices easies comparison, composition, and transferring such practices. This poses an input of interest for SE education.

Abstract Best practices of software development and software process improvement (SPI) are people‐centred. Both have a high level of influence of social and human factors inherent to the individuals involved in these processes. At the same time, software process improvement is inherent to the change of the conditions and the behaviour of individuals. In this work, the authors show the results of applying a deductive approach for a method based on gamification and social and human factors to influence the productivity of the software development team. The results show that it is possible to abstract all the design aspects of an existing strategy called Interplanetary Mission and identify the social and human factors involved in change resistance in SPI initiatives. The strategy execution results show that gamification strategies could help to mitigate change resistance in SPI initiatives for software development teams and their productivity, understanding this term in software engineering context as the ratio between output and input within the software development production process.

Abstract We are living in an age of growing demand for software products. This growing demand creates opportunities for very small entities (VSEs) to not only survive but also flourish. In this context, VSEs need to produce high‐quality products to meet market needs. However, in their quest to produce high‐quality software, VSEs need to overcome the challenge of implementing international standards, which they find difficult to do because of lack of knowledge and practical experience. This paper provides an analysis performed to 13 teams of VSEs, using different life cycles, which achieved the implementation of the ISO/IEC 29110, to analyze the effort each team invests to implement the best practices provided by the standard. Besides, the paper provides an analysis of the difficulties, and the benefits of using the six‐step method are included. This analysis is of interest because software engineering knowledge developed by researchers should be transferred to the industry to reduce the gap between them. The results highlight, on the one hand, the practices representing more effort for teams by life cycle. On the other hand, the results highlight the six‐step method that allowed the 13 teams to achieve a high level of coverage of the ISO/IEC 29110 international standard.

Gamification is used in several contexts, such as marketing, education, and public health. The authors implement gamification to promote a dynamic environment relative to software process improvement. However, well‐established theoretical guidelines to design gamified experiences are lacking. The authors propose a framework to assess gamified environments, identify and adopt gamification principles, as well as design gamified activities. The proposed framework helps users create gamified experiences that satisfy the purposes, goals, principles, and elements defined as fundamental gamification components. Here, the authors apply the proposed framework to a video scrum simulation to assess the adoption of gamification principles. The case study includes identification of gamification principles incorporated in the video scrum and their relationships to the elements of the mechanics, dynamics, and emotions framework. The results show that the game elements defined in the design layer of the proposed framework were realised in the video scrum simulation.

Nowadays computer games are applied beyond entertainment. Gamification, the application of game elements in non‐game environments supports behavioural studies in different disciplines including software engineering, the area in which collaborative work has become a fundamental key. The most used gamification elements in software development environments were analysed from two perspectives: (i) team building or reinforcement activities; and (ii) regarding a set of people's interactive styles. Then, interactive styles with software engineering roles were related in order to be able to identify scenarios that conform a model to build highly effective teams. The three analyses together allow identifying proper gamification elements for modelling scenarios to support the creation of highly effective teams in the software development domain.

Teaching software architecture to undergraduate students is particularly hard because they typically have no experience with medium or large systems with competing stakeholders. A particularly hard case is ATAM (Architecture Trade-off Analysis Method), which allows the evaluation of architectural designs and quality attributes by competing stakeholders. This article describes ATAM-RPG, a role-playing game to support the teaching of ATAM by simulating stakeholder's interaction and trade-offs. The initial ATAM-RPG case incorporates the architecture, scenarios and design trade-offs of the Chilean national tsunami alert system (SNAM). The approach was tested by deploying the SNAM case in undergraduate courses; initial results show that ATAM-RPG was well-evaluated regarding trade-off description and understanding (and especially utility trees). Students also recognized the importance of exercising technically-based negotiation skills. We conclude that role playing games can be fruitfully used for software architecture education.

Growing demand for embedded systems translates into the need for professionals with specialized skills and knowledge for the production of systems that integrate hardware and software. Teachers and institutions incorporate innovative strategies from the earliest stages of the formation of professionals who build embedded systems. The game as a creative and innovative strategy has proven efficiency in the training of professionals from different disciplinary domains. In this paper the use of a serious game for the development of social and ethical skills is proposed. The game is called Trouble Hunters where participants make up commissions of inquiry to analyze the failed cases of software development. In this way, participants must identify causes, consequences, missing competencies and wrong decisions by engineers. Additionally creativity is promoted with answers through cartoons, logos or hieroglyphics.