IT bachelor capstone project during lockdown: Student experiences

Medical lockdown was a fact in Norway March 2020. As a result, bachelor students were no longer able to complete their studies in an ordinary way. New forms of collaboration and communication had to be established quickly, while many companies were closed down and employees worked from home. This study focuses on students in a bachelor program in IT working on their bachelor thesis. We used a survey questionnaire and grades from the bachelor capstone project to evaluate effects caused by the situation. The findings show that infection control measures due to Covid-19 has had a significant perceived negative effect on collaboration, communication and results. In contrast to this, the results in the form of grades are unaffected by the situation. This indicates that students felt stressed by the situation, but in practice handled this stress well. For future projects such as these, we recommend guiding students to regularly use online communication tools, even when physical proximity is possible. If major disruptions happen, supervisors should help students focus on this as a learning opportunity. &nbsp

Students as co-producers in a multidisciplinary software engineering project: addressing cultural distance and cross-cohort handover

This article reports on an undergraduate software engineering project in which, over a period of two years, four student teams from different cohorts developed a note-taking app for four academic clients at the students’ own university. We investigated how projects involving internal clients can give students the benefits of engaging in real software development while also giving them experience of a student-staff collaboration that has its own benefits for students, academics, and the university more broadly. As the university involved is a Sino-Foreign university located in China, where most students are Chinese and most teaching staff are not, this ‘student as co-producer’ approach interacts with another feature of the project: cultural distance. Based on analysis of notes, reports, interviews, and focus groups, we recommend that students should be provided with communicative strategies for dealing with academics as clients; universities should develop policies on ownership of student-staff collaborations; and projects should include a formalised handover process. This article can serve as guidance for educators considering a ‘students as co-producers’ approach for software development projects

A systematic literature review of capstone courses in software engineering

Context: Tertiary education institutions aim to prepare their computer science and software engineering students for working life. While much of the technical principles are covered in lower-level courses, team-based capstone courses are a common way to provide students with hands-on experience and teach soft skills. Objective: This paper explores the characteristics of project-based software engineering capstone courses presented in the literature. The goal of this work is to understand the pros and cons of different approaches by synthesising the various aspects of software engineering capstone courses and related experiences. Method: In a systematic literature review for 2007–2022, we identified 127 articles describing real-world capstone courses. These articles were analysed based on their presented course characteristics and the reported course outcomes. Results: The characteristics were synthesised into a taxonomy consisting of duration, team sizes, client and project sources, project implementation, and student assessment. We found out that capstone courses generally last one semester and divide students into groups of 4–5 where they work on a project for a client. For a slight majority of courses, the clients are external to the course staff and students are often expected to produce a proof-of-concept level software product as the main end deliverable. The courses generally include various forms of student assessment both during and at the end of the course. Conclusions: This paper provides researchers and educators with a classification of characteristics of software engineering capstone courses based on previous research. We also further synthesise insights on the reported course outcomes. Our review study aims to help educators to identify various ways of organising capstones and effectively plan and deliver their own capstone courses. The characterisation also helps researchers to conduct further studies on software engineering capstones.Context: Tertiary education institutions aim to prepare their computer science and software engineering students for working life. While much of the technical principles are covered in lower-level courses, team-based capstone courses are a common way to provide students with hands-on experience and teach soft skills. Objective: This paper explores the characteristics of project-based software engineering capstone courses presented in the literature. The goal of this work is to understand the pros and cons of different approaches by synthesising the various aspects of software engineering capstone courses and related experiences. Method: In a systematic literature review for 2007–2022, we identified 127 articles describing real-world capstone courses. These articles were analysed based on their presented course characteristics and the reported course outcomes. Results: The characteristics were synthesised into a taxonomy consisting of duration, team sizes, client and project sources, project implementation, and student assessment. We found out that capstone courses generally last one semester and divide students into groups of 4–5 where they work on a project for a client. For a slight majority of courses, the clients are external to the course staff and students are often expected to produce a proof-of-concept level software product as the main end deliverable. The courses generally include various forms of student assessment both during and at the end of the course. Conclusions: This paper provides researchers and educators with a classification of characteristics of software engineering capstone courses based on previous research. We also further synthesise insights on the reported course outcomes. Our review study aims to help educators to identify various ways of organising capstones and effectively plan and deliver their own capstone courses. The characterisation also helps researchers to conduct further studies on software engineering capstones.Peer reviewe

Exploring the Gap between the Student Expectations and the Reality of Teamwork in Undergraduate Software Engineering Group Projects.

Software engineering group projects aim to provide a nurturing environment for learning about teamwork in software engineering. Since social and teamwork issues have been consistently identified as serious problems in such projects, we aim to better understand the breakdown between the expectations teams have at the start of a group project and their experiences at the end of the project. In this paper, we investigate how 35 teams of undergraduate students approach software engineering group project courses, and how their previous experience with collaborative software development matches their expectations for group work. We then analyse the retrospective documents delivered by the same teams at the end of a 27-week software engineering group project course, mirroring the expectations at the start of the project with the realities described by the end of it

Developing Software Engineers: Investigating the Influence of a Computer Science Capstone on Professional Identity Formation

Professional identity, or the connection between individuals and their professional community of practice, begins forming as early as deciding a major for university studies. Development is supported or hindered by situated practices and experiences throughout undergraduate studies and across the transition from university to the workplace. To explore how the academic setting supports or hinders professional identity formation, I expand situated learning theory with stages of concern to directly model identity-related progression of concerns across situated planes of development.My dissertation research focuses on the Computer Science (CS) capstone experience. The CS capstone course is composed of teams of four to six undergraduate CS students. Each team works directly with an external sponsor to apply software engineering practices toward a project with real-world impact. I conducted interviews with 19 students across two cohorts of the capstone course, and gathered individual and team artifacts from five cohorts of the course. Analysis of this qualitative dataset explores the role of emotions and interest in supporting student engagement and perception of project relevance. These findings culminated in my proposed framework, Multiple Planes of Concern or MPoC, which combines planes of development with stages of concern for examining support for professional identity formation in an academic setting.This dissertation is organized around three publications over the course of my studies. Outcomes from this dissertation research include the MPoC analytical framework, a conjecture map linking the CS capstone structure to learning theory, broader implications for educational support of professional identity, the CS Capstone Dataset, and the academic artifact consent policy. I advance theory at the intersection of learning sciences and formation of professional identity in CS

Governance of innovation project management : necessary and neglected

The study is motivated by the aspiration to understand project governance in organizations pursuing the development of new products and services across multiple knowledge worker teams. In particular, the following problem statement guides the study: Is governance of innovation project management necessary or neglected? Taking the example of agile teams, I illustrate how the advancements in team based project management approaches force us to rethink governance of innovation project management. The findings are based on eight studies. The data consists of results from a total of 53 knowledge worker teams across 44 organizations in 8 countries. The two main conclusions drawn from this study are: (1) fundamentally different approaches to governance of innovation projects are a prerequisite for a success of projects developing new products and services, and (2) governance, particularly in heavily top-down influenced fields such as public administration, will benefit from advancements in agile project management methods.This research project has been supported by the Living Lab The Hague project co-funded with support from the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union.Algorithms and the Foundations of Software technolog