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

4: Case findings: students’ view on relating to different communities
Our analysis resulted in four main findings, the first one relating to customers’
viewpoints on the projects and the others relating to students’ viewpoints.
4.1. Customers have several different goals for their project participation
Customer interviews indicated satisfaction with the project; products having been
developed according to specifications and expectations and at very low cost. Many
customers reported that used the project to learn about and/or evaluate their technology
and/or ideas. Also, many said they had learnt something that would influence their daily
work. Further, many reported learning about playing the role of customer, e.g. in terms
of needs for involvement. The requirements specification was generally regarded by
customers as the most important project document. Finally, many customers were
looking for new employees, and some ended up recruiting from the project groups.
4.2. Project teams relate to communities and community membership
We find that SD project students actively relate to the various communities involved
and the balancing of requirements from different project stakeholders
In our interviews we asked the students how they mainly saw themselves working in
the project (e.g. at the customer’s site): as students or consultants/professionals.
Students generally saw themselves as students. There was some indication that groups
who most strongly considered their work to be of real value to the customer, also
considered themselves more as consultants. The customer’s expressed confidence in the
group, expectations for the result and willingness to provide necessary resources
seemed to boost students’ self confidence about their role as novice professionals.
Most groups considered their project to be close to a real SE project, with the
exception of the course staff’s requirements for documentation, the lack of
consequences if the project failed and the general absence of economic considerations.
“This is no Mickey Mouse project”, as the project manager in one group expressed it.
4.3 Awareness of stakeholder goals is often insufficient in the teams
Students are not necessarily aware of all stakeholder goals for the project work (e.g.
as revealed in our customer interviews), or they have an interpretation of stakeholder
goals that might have been questioned by the stakeholders themselves if they had
known students’ reasoning.
Students are aware that different stakeholder goals should be met, some related to
completing work as a SE project and others to completing the project as a university
course: “In a real project there would have been money involved. Now focus is very
much on us making a project following the school’s requirements, even if some of the
school’s requirements is that it should be good for the customer, but here in a way we
work to have the best possible grade, apart from working on a product that sort of leads
to further contracts; the customer is happy.”
We found a general opinion among the students that the role of the university is to
provide and test students’ use of “by the book” SE knowledge. There is a largely
implicit requirement that guidelines and practices (e.g. of modeling, diagramming and
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