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

Figure 1.
A SE student team at work
SE is complex design work (Carstensen and Schmidt 2002 (1999)), and project teams have to manage
project tasks under constraints such as deadlines, team members‟ competence and customers‟ changing
product requirements. While some of the project challenges are technical, many are mainly about
interpersonal issues. Collaboration with project stakeholders (e.g. customer, supervisor, technology
providers) is frequently challenging to the teams (Krogstie and Bygstad 2007; Krogstie 2008).
Stakeholder communication is an area in which industry points to a need for SE students to gain
competence through experience in student projects (McMillan 1999).
The work in SE projects is supported by collaboration technology. In the case of many SE industry
projects, and typically in student projects, lightweight collaboration tools are used. Lightweight
collaboration tools can be acquired and taken into use at low cost (e.g. money, time to learn) for
individuals and their organization. A lightweight collaboration tool typically provides a limited set of
features to support one aspect of collaborative work and may thus be relatively easily integrated into
existing work processes (rather than imposing a certain process on the user). Many of the lightweight
collaboration tools are associated with Web 2.0, e.g. wikis, discussion forums, and instant messaging.
In this paper, we shed light on the use of instant messaging tools in SE student teams. Our main questions
are: when IM is used to aid project work, for what purposes and in what way is IM used? And what are
the implications for the organization of SE project courses? The findings reported in the paper originate in
qualitative studies of three cohorts of SE project students, 2006, 2007 and 2008, in which we investigated
the students‟ use of collaboration technology in their project work.
The paper is organized as follows: In Section 2 we briefly describe the functionality of IM tools and
present related work on the use of instant messaging among students and in work life. In Section 3 we
outline our research approach. Findings on the use of IM in the SE student projects of our study are
presented in Section 4. In Section 5 we discuss the findings in light of implications for the the
organization and supervision of SE student projects. Section 6 concludes the paper.
2 BACKGROUND
We start this section by briefly outlining the main functionality of IM tools. There are many different IM
platforms. They include AOL‟s Instant Messenger and Microsoft‟s Windows Messenger (MSN). Key
attributes of IM tools are (Garrett and Danziger 2008):
Near-synchronous communication that can be initiated by either party
Presence awareness showing if other users are connected and/or available
Notifications of incoming communication, typically with pop-up windows
Many tools support the exchange of speech and video as well, but in what follows we will focus on what
can be considered the basic functionality: textual chat. This is the functionality used by the SE students in
our case.
When a user logs on to the IM service, a „buddy list‟ appears on the screen. The list shows the user‟s
contacts and updated information on their status: whether they are logged on to the service, and any
message they might have left indicating their availability and/or current activity. “Busy reading for exam”
could for instance be such a message. If the user chooses to initiate a chat with a contact in the buddy list,
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