I recently got interested in financial board games and saw how they can be very useful in educating children about certain concepts.
It got me thinking whether it was also possible to represent certain aspects of executing a software project via a boardgame and make it fun.
Here are a few things that I have come up so far:
human resources and tools / techniques are represented as cards.
requirements are also represented as cards, which are dealt equally to each player, and the objective is to move all requirement cards through an "SDLC" board (one per player) that represent a series of squares grouped according to phases (design all the way to deployment)
the passage of time is represented in a main square board like monopoly, and completing a trip around the board (passing "Go") allows the player to move each of the requirement cards a number of steps through the SDLC board depending on the capability of the resource cards (senior programmer allows one requirement to move two squares in the dev phase, junior programmer only one, etc.)
players will start with play money representing the project budget, and at every pass at "Go" is payday. the player is out of the game if he runs out of funds.
the main board also has "chance" / "risk" cards, which represent things that can mess up a project. damage is applied at the roll of a die, and chance modifiers depend on whether the user has "bought" tools / techniques.
I haven't implemented this idea yet as I'm still looking at more play elements that can make the game more engaging, as well as soliciting for more ideas.
I am planning to release this under Creative Commons license but haven't decided on the exact license yet.
Any more game play suggestions are welcome.
UPDATE: This was posted in BoardGameGeek and there's now an active discussion thread there. http://www.boardgamegeek.com/article/4436694
