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

Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2009
7. Conclusion and further work
In this paper, we have drawn upon a detailed study
of a postmortem interview from a capstone SE student
project to demonstrate the potential of project wikis to
be used as a means for the recall of, and reflection on,
a project process, thus making the project wikis already
in use even more useful to the project teams.
Some limitations to our research provide directions
for further research. The interview forming the core of
our empirical data was partially exploratory, and
adequate for pointing out the potential for project wikis
to aid in postmortem reflection. Our findings indicate
how various types of information may be used to recall
and reflect on various types of issues. However, we do
not have sufficient data to reasonably generalize about
the connections between the two. We suggest that
wiki-aided postmortem reviews be conducted in other
projects and the interaction and tool use of the
participants during the sessions be analyzed. The
interviews should follow a well founded design for a
postmortem review and be video recorded. In this way
it might be possible to identify what type of
information in a project wiki promotes reflection in
certain ways or on certain topics. Also, collective, toolmediated
postmortem reflection should be investigated.
Our wiki walkthrough tool needs to be evaluated
through use in real projects to see if it is deemed useful
by the project teams.
The idea of utilizing history stored in a
collaboration tool in reflection on the process is
relevant to other tools. E.g., source code management
and bug tracking tools contain a history of commented
project artifact revisions. The student teams at our
university increasingly prefer this type of tool (e.g.
Trac) to manage their SE projects. A next step in our
research is to conduct and evaluate postmortem
reviews mediated by these tools to see if they, too, can
help students learn from their SE project experience.
7. Acknowledgements
Thanks to Monica Divitini, Arne Martin Aurlien,
Håvard Håskjold and William Young. The research
was funded by the MOTUS2 project at NTNU.
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