System Dynamics Modeling and Simulation in Software Engineering Education

In the practical software development, there are many complexities including dynamic behavior and feedback mechanism as well as various interacting factors. Software Engineering education is facing difficulties because students have limited engineering experience and they can hardly understand typical phenomena occurring in software projects. System Dynamics is a continual modeling method describing the interaction between project factors. It forces one to consider system behavior in global view. In this paper Brooks´ Law was used as example to demonstrate the essential components and the advantages of system dynamics approach. Finally, the uses of system dynamics approach in critical areas of software engineering are presented.