Evaluation of Project´s Progresses

It is not easy for the instructor to judge the success or failure of a project. In the easiest case he/she can evaluate the simulation runs exclusively on basis of the achieved objectives. This will reduce the learning success for the trainees to nearly a minimum, because they will not get any feedback about their actual process mistakes.

To be able to indicate the projectmanagment faults of the trainees, the single project(simulation runs) will be exactly analysed by the instructor.

That´s the only way, that trainees can be confronted with their own failures and learn from them!

Evaluation Component

The evaluation component (part of the explanation component) anayses simulation run histories using various evaluation criteria. The instrcutor is greatly relieved by the automatic analysis of simulation runs. The AMEISE simulation environment is also suitable for self-study, as trainees start the evaluation by the evaluation component themselves. The evaluation results will be presented to the trainee in form of diagrams and explanatory text. In the explanatory text, the trainee is drawn to wrong decisions and their impact on the project. The trainee also gets hints that will help him/her to avoid these mistakes during the next project.

Evaluations can also be started during the simulation run. For example, the trainee may call at the end of the specification phase, "residual errors in the specification" and - depending on the outcome - again trigger a review or start the next phase.

Most of the evaluation results are used to analyse the simulation run as a whole. Therefore starting, evaluation component often does not make sense during the simulation run.

Common Mistakes

The analysis of AMEISE simulation runs has shown that the following mistakes are committed rather often:

• '"Objectives are not (at all) achieved"
  • The trainees often have a big problem to fulfill all objectives of the project.
• '"Employee are underemployed"
  • Most trainees face the problem of continuously occupy the employees. Often, it seems that employees are just hanging around for a longer period.
• '"Examination and correction activites are missing or are only beeing without fullfilling any activity"
  • Many trainees forget about the necessety to review/test and correct the documents proceeded during each single phase. Hence,documents or code will be error prone leading again to bad results.