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Team composition in software engineering project courses

Published: 02 June 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Composing well-balanced, effective development teams for software engineering project courses is important for facilitating learning, fostering student motivation as well as obtaining a successful project outcome. However, team composition is a challenging task for instructors because they have to consider a variety of possibly conflicting criteria such as practical constraints, skill distribution, or project motivation.
In this paper, we describe our process for composing development teams based on a pre-defined set of criteria that we have established from our experience conducting project courses since 2008 and constantly refined since. We reflect on these criteria by analyzing the team synergy and project satisfaction of participating students as well as their perspective on challenges in their teams in one concrete instance of a multi-project capstone course. Our findings show that lack of motivation, problems with interpersonal relationships and communication issues affect the less satisfied teams more than the others.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SEEM '18: Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Software Engineering Education for Millennials
June 2018
103 pages
ISBN:9781450357500
DOI:10.1145/3194779
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 02 June 2018

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Author Tags

  1. agile methods
  2. applied education
  3. experiential learning
  4. project course
  5. software engineering
  6. team composition
  7. teamwork

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  • (2024)Fostering Teamwork in Software Engineering ProjectsProceedings of the 2024 on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 210.1145/3649405.3659512(820-820)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Utilizing the Constrained K-Means Algorithm and Pre-Class GitHub Contribution Statistics for Forming Student TeamsProceedings of the 2024 on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3649217.3653634(569-575)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2024
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