Training in Requirements by Collaboration: Branching Stories in Second Life

Training by playing is believed to be an effective strategy for learning. Training games combine educational and technological techniques that help learners to get involved, collaborate and learn in a practical and interactive way. Collaboration is inherent to software requirements elicitation which involves customers, users and developers to achieve an overall goal. In this article, a game entitled TREG that simulates various activities in software requirements workshop is proposed. The trainee interacts with Non-Player Characters and according to the trainee's choice the game reenacts a specific scenario. The social simulation in the game is based on the branching stories genre. Each branching node is described using a scenario-based template. The game was prototyped in Second Life, a virtual world that gives the possibility to create an immersive collaborative educational experience.