A Role-Playing Game for a Software Engineering Lab: Developing a Product Line

Software product line development refers to software engineering practices and techniques for creating families of similar software systems from a basic set of reusable components, called shared assets. Teaching how to deal with software product lines in a university lab course is a challenging task, because there are several practical issues that have to be solved in short time. In this paper we report an experience of ours, showing how in the context of a software engineering course at University of Bologna our students tackled the task of developing a software product line consisting of four products which were variants of a basic shared asset. The main idea is that the laboratory activities performed by our students followed the rules of a role-playing game. We describe this experience, defining the role-playing game by a meta-model which abstracts the notion of software process, and we show how we enacted the process for a software product line.