Towards Better Support for Undergraduate Software Engineering Teams

Abstract

Team-based projects are increasingly used within software engineering education because they can teach valuable communication and collaboration skills to help prepare students for professional software engineering positions. However, team-based projects are not without their downsides: in particular, poor communication or a lack of participation can endanger the success of the project. We propose identifying metrics and building a predictive model to help instructors detect when teams are facing harmful dynamics, and evaluations to assess the metrics and their impact on teams in undergraduate software engineering courses.