The work-reflection-learning cycle - Department of Computer and ...

Cross-Community Collaboration and Learning in Customer-Driven
Software Engineering Student Projects
Birgit Krogstie
NTNU
birgitkr@idi.ntnu.no
Bendik Bygstad
NITH
bendik.bygstad@nith.no
Abstract
This paper explores collaboration and learning between stakeholders in customer-driven
student projects. The research objectives are to obtain empirically based knowledge on how
students relate to stakeholders in customer-driven projects, and to suggest implications for
the pedagogical design of the project courses.
Empirical data was collected from two Bachelor courses in software engineering at two
learning institutions in Norway. To make sense of the interaction between the three
stakeholders in the project: the student groups, the university and the customer, we build on
Wenger’s concept of communities of practice and on the concept of boundary objects.
Our analysis highlights that students, through practical experience in the projects, learn to
balance the requirements and expectations from different stakeholders in designing a working
technical solution - a valuable skill for software engineers. We argue that for students to
learn to balance stakeholders’ interests in the best possible way, visibility of stakeholders’
goals should be focused throughout the projects. Explicit reference to the goals should be
incorporated into project artifacts serving as boundary objects. Collaboration technologies
providing standard shared workspace functionality are seen as adequate to support this.
1. Introduction
Software Engineering (SE) project courses provide students with arenas for project
based learning [1, 2] and serve as a stage of transition from the student role to that of a
SE professional. Projects with external customers and “real” problems provide
authenticity [3] and have been found to be useful in preparing the students for work in
the IT industry [4]. A pedagogical ideal for the projects can be seen to have the students
complete a tour of “educational refinement” in the SE “real world”, making use of their
knowledge and skills to their best of their ability while having their beliefs challenged.
Through the projects, we want students to make a first step towards practicing the SE
‘methodology-in-action’ [5] which requires enough experience to allow for a critical
distance to, and application of, the formalized SE methodology taught at the university.
In SE projects, success depends on the team recognizing and reconciling the different
goals, knowledge and practices among major stakeholders [6, 7]. In customer-driven
student projects, there is one stakeholder not found in professional SE: the university as
represented by the course staff. The latter serves as a resource assisting the students in
meeting realistic challenges of SE work, e.g. managing the customer relationship, but at
the same time, they impose complexity and constraints that are not there in real SE
work. The research objectives of the work presented in this paper are to obtain
empirically based knowledge on how students relate to stakeholders in customer-driven
projects, and to suggest implications for the pedagogical design of the project courses.
In what follows, we first introduce our theoretical understanding of stakeholder
communities and goals, and how students’ reconciliation of them is essential to
learning. Particularly, we point to the role of artifacts as boundary objects between
communities. In section 3 we present our case study. In section 4 we provide a number
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