Analyzing coordination among students in a software engineering project course

Coordination among developers has long been recognized as critical in software projects. One of the reasons for running large project software engineering courses is to teach students how to coordinate while working in a group; yet we have little understanding of how the students might fail or ways to assist them in learning this skill. Socio-technical congruence is a way to measure coordination based on the fit between communications among developers and the dependencies of the project. In this work-in-progress paper, we use a measure of socio-technical congruence to analyze the coordination in a student software engineering team. We found that congruence did not improve over time as has been shown for professional software teams. We then describe a proposed tool that uses socio-technical congruence measures to support and give advice to students who are learning how to effectively coordinate activities on a group project.

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