Exploring the gap between the student expectations and the reality of teamwork in undergraduate software engineering group projects.

Iacob, Claudia; Faily, Shamal

Abstract

Software engineering group projects aim to provide a nurturing environment for learning about teamwork in software engineering. Since social and teamwork issues have been consistently identified as serious problems in such projects, we aim to better understand the breakdown between the expectations teams have at the start of a group project and their experiences at the end of the project. In this paper, we investigate how 35 teams of undergraduate students approach software engineering group project courses, and how their previous experience with collaborative software development matches their expectations for group work. We then analyse the retrospective documents delivered by the same teams at the end of a 27-week software engineering group project course, mirroring the expectations at the start of the project with the realities described by the end of it.

Citation

IACOB, C. and FAILY, S. 2019. Exploring the gap between the student expectations and the reality of teamwork in undergraduate software engineering group projects. Journal of systems and software [online], 157, article number 110393. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2019.110393

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Aug 12, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Aug 12, 2019
• Publication Date: Nov 30, 2019
• Deposit Date: Sep 17, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 7, 2021
• Journal: Journal of systems and software
• Print ISSN: 0164-1212
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 157
• Article Number: 110393
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2019.110393
• Keywords: Computing students; Computing education; Student group projects; Software engineering
• Public URL: https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/1427728