Interaction factors in software development performance in distributed student teams in computer science

Abstract

This research in progress paper compares the characteristics of high and low performance distributed student teams doing software development in Computer Science. The distributed student teams were involved in a software development project that was part of a Computer Science course at two universities located in different countries.We developed a set of categories to examine the email communication of distributed student teams. This paper tracks the progression and changes in the categories coded for each team's communication throughout the project's timeline, particularly during key decision periods in the software development cycle.

Inter-University software engineering using web services

“…al. [10,9] researched the effects of software development performance due to the interaction factors of project teams that are not co-located. Each team of six students contained three members in the USA and three members in Sweden.…”

Learning from students

“…It prepares people to work together better." Study A [3][4][5][6], which focused on the software development process, has investigated in detail the communication (email and Internet Relay Chat) from the 2000 instance. Among the several issues being studied are the software development process throughout the project timeline, specific team actions and their timings (identified through a category system), and team roles and their effects on performance.…”

“…One discovery from Study A is that in some of the teams, the student who received the highest grade in a team was also the individual who had the greatest frequency of communication events [5,6]. This can be summed up by the advice given by one student from year 2001: "You can never communicate too much, especially with the professors.…”

“…The project has been the basis for a number of separate studies. Study A has focused on the software development process [3][4][5][6], while Study B has focused on group development in virtual teams [7][8][9][10][11]. As researchers, we are an "invisible" presence in the courses; that is, we are not the teachers involved and none of the students ever see us.…”

The "instructed-teacher"

“…There have been several implementations of CSCL reported in the computer science literature in the areas of asynchronous peer feedback [13], synchronous design [22], extended team based projects [11] and the use of tablet PCs to support sharing of solutions to conceptual problems [16]. The research described in this paper focuses upon tightly interactive authentic-task approaches to mental model formation.…”