Introduction
Project management can be considered an universal concept, but according to the software engineering literature and recent researches [3][11][16] its adoption in software projects is still inadequate and deficient. The high number of software projects that are cancelled each year and the number of project presenting schedule and cost overruns [3][16] may be consequences of this lack of project management. It is widely accepted that experienced project managers perform better than inexperienced managers in concluding their projects successfully, that is, within their planned schedules and budgets. Project management is strongly dependent on knowledge and still many project managers are promoted from technical teams due to their successes in previous projects without proper training and education to acquire management skills [11]. Thus, education strategies adopted to prepare project managers play an important role in preventing from inadequate use of management techniques on software projects, providing the basis to leverage the present scenario of so many faulty projects. This paper discusses current project management education strategies and their deficiencies. We consider the application of simulation and games to support management training. We have developed a game, namely The Incredible Manager, and used it in two experimental studies to evaluate our hypotheses concerning the usefulness of games to a project management training program. This paper presents the game structure and results obtained from the studies. The paper is organized in eight sections. The first one comprises this introduction. The next section discusses the deficiencies presented by the traditional professor-centric education strategy when applied to project management courses and some research that has been made to complement this approach with other tools. Section 3 presents the game that we have developed and its architecture. The following sections present the major components that compose this architecture: Section 4 presents the simulation model, Section 5 presents the simulation model, while Section 6 describes the game machine. Section 7 discusses the experimental studies that were executed to evaluate the game usefulness. Section 8 concludes the paper by presenting our final considerations.