Simulating software development

What is it i’ve been working on

I wanted to create a game that would challenge people to manage a software development team in an effective way. The core of the game would be based around ideas taken from Systems Thinking and games like the Dot Game and the Red Bead Experiment.

What have i done so far

Only enough to give myself and others a better idea of what im trying to do. I have a single example of a simple team with a customer, analysts, developer and QA with varying capacities to complete work. As the simulation is run i currently collect data on the amount of work in progress at the wend of every day and the total lead time of each item of work.

What’s to come next

At the moment you can only configure a team to pull single items of work through so a batching mechanism will be needed to help simulate concepts like iterations. Also there is a constant rate of work per team member this needs to be converted into varying complexity per work item based on the role required to accomplish the work.

Getting hold of the code

You can clone the code from my git hub repository…

git clone https://github.com/chrisabird/Development-Team-Simulator.git
git checkout v0.1

rake sample

Feedback

Based on the initial small amount of code i’d love to hear what people think or any ideas on how to make the game more realistic or how an interface might work to this games. There are no comments allowed here but i would love feedback via twitter.