  Software Engineering is an applied discipline and concepts are difficult to
grasp only at a theoretical level alone. In the context of a project management
course, we introduced and evaluated the use of software process simulation
(SPS) based games for improving students' understanding of software development
processes. The effects of the intervention were measured by evaluating the
students' arguments for choosing a particular development process. The
arguments were assessed with the Evidence-Based Reasoning framework, which was
extended to assess the strength of an argument. The results indicate that
students generally have difficulty providing strong arguments for their choice
of process models. Nevertheless, the assessment indicates that the intervention
of the SPS game had a positive impact on the students' arguments. Even though
the illustrated argument assessment approach can be used to provide formative
feedback to students, its use is rather costly and cannot be considered a
replacement for traditional assessments.
