Understanding individual contribution and collaboration in student software teams

Software development is an inherently team-based activity, and many software-engineering courses are structured around team projects, in order to provide students with an authentic learning experience. The collaborative-development tools through which student developers define, share and manage their tasks generate a detailed record in the process. Albeit not designed for this purpose, this record can provide the instructor with insights into the students' work, the team's progress over time, and the individual team-member's contributions. In this paper, we describe an analysis and visualization toolkit that enables instructors to interactively explore the trace of the team's collaborative work, to better understand the team dynamics, and the tasks of the individual team developers. We also discuss our grounded-theory analysis of one team's work, based on their email exchanges, questionnaires and interviews. Our analyses suggest that the inferences supported by our toolkit are congruent with the developers' feedback, while there are some discrepancies with the reflections of the team as a whole.