Game procedure

A stack of cards symbolises any software project. The individual cards represent the features to be developed. The players choose the role of either the Developer or Quality Assurance and go through the various phases of software development one after the other.

In the Develop phase, all cards from the stack must be placed in the game area in the shortest possible time. Once a card has been placed, it may no longer be touched, just as a finished feature is often no longer edited during programming. As each function may only exist once, duplicates should be removed.

In the deploy phase, a randomly selected developer must collect all cards from the game area in descending order. Only cards that are not (partially) covered by another card may be collected.
Any duplicates should also be deleted here.

The QA then receives the created stack of cards and has one last opportunity to rearrange or remove cards before the final stack, i.e. the final product, is handed over to the customer.
Only if the stack is completely free of errors will the software run as desired.

The players then see a detailed list of their results. This shows the two factors of time and errors, which play an important role in software development.

The players then play a second round with almost the same rules. The only difference: in the first phase, the developers are allowed to move the cards on the game area as often as they like after placing them. This makes pre-sorting much easier and the selected dev will find it easier to create the final pile of cards.
After the second round, the results from both rounds will be compared and the players will see that they will achieve a better end result if they invest time in refactoring and that technical debt has a negative impact on the end product.

Requirements

Three to four players are required to play the Technical Debt Game.
The website is only accessible via the university network.
The game is not designed for smartphones.

Outlook

In future, the game will be supervised by the HSA_innolab and used in courses at the university to teach students in a fun way. Further agile games are to be realised in other projects in the future.

Students:

• Samir Akhundov
• Judith Saul
• Omar Yacine