SESAM - simulating software projects

Abstract

Teaching software engineering as well as researching in this area is very tedious due to the length and costliness of software projects. SESAM (Software Engineering Simulation by Animated Models') therefore is designed as a simulator for software projects, allowing students to gain reality-like experiences in project management and researchers to evaluate hypotheses on the mechanisms influencing software projects. This paper focuses on the basic assumptions for SESAM, its building blocks and the way hypotheses are affecting the simulation. After a short description of the requirements for SESAM, the authors introduce objects, attributes, actions, relationships between objects, and hypotheses as its basic concepts. They present attributed graph grammars as a means for representing hypotheses. Finally they position their project with respect to related work, and they show its present a state and future development.