Evaluation of collaborative development environments for software engineering courses in higher education

Abstract

Collaborative Development Environments (CDEs) play a significant role in modern software engineering by integrating multiple crucial tools and functions for the development process at a single point and therefore by providing elemental support for the collaboration of the developers and utilizing synergetic effects through the combination of these tools and social functions. To prepare students optimally they should be trained to use those systems effectively. In this paper we define a criteria list for the evaluation of CDEs to be able to decide which CDE or combination of tools is most suitable for the use in a certain software engineering course in higher education. We build this work on our accumulated experiences and findings of six years of project support for students and scientists in a computer science department.