Using Software Engineering Concepts in Game Development - Sharing Experiences of Two Institutions

Software requirements engineering plays an important role in software engineering curriculum as well as other computing curriculum. IEEE and ACM jointly have strong curriculum guidelines that emphasize the importance of software engineering, and requirements engineering is one of the key areas emphasized in these guidelines. Additionally, system development is important so students practice the process - taking what is learned in courses and applying these software engineering processes within the context of real software development projects. The key issue as documented by previous studies is how to capture both the conceptual ideas of software engineering processes while at the same time (or in following semesters) implementing these concepts successfully within software development projects. Typically, the processes are taught in one course with minimal implementation within a project; at the same time, software development courses emphasize the development with little to no formal utilization of processes. This is not a criticism of faculty; it is simply a very difficult task to cover both the processes and implementation in a cohesive manner. Covering all of this material within one academic term is problematic, and coordinating across multiple semesters poses its own challenges. This paper presents a case study in which faculty from two different universities - one private and one public - within the context of two different student populations - a group of software engineering students and a group of computer game development students. This heterogeneous community was established intentionally to leverage the strengths of both groups in a symbiotic environment wherein the software engineering students could focus on the more formal process of requirements engineering (within the context of their course) while the computer game development students could focus on the implementation and development (within the context of their course). The collaboration had the engineering and development students acting as 'customers' for each other - trading the software requirements specification document back and forth, improving it-iteratively utilizing teamwork and requirements engineering. In the context of performing requirements engineering; our process also allows students to explore distributed project management using modern collaborative tools. This case study describes the process utilized and how it can be replicated elsewhere. Additionally, we present analysis from quantitative and qualitative results we've obtained as part of this study. Lessons learned in this research can be applied to other programs seeking a way to have the best of both worlds combining software engineering processes within the context of implementation projects.