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

The work-reflection-learning cycle in SE student projects: Use of collaboration tools
3.4 Using work tools as tools for learning
In project work in industry, lessons learned are frequently not elicited and documented.
Among the reasons are a lack of integration of experience recording into the project
processes and team members believing that coding their experience is ineffective and/or
not personally useful to them (Schindler and Eppler 2003). In the Software Engineering
field, Kasi and colleagues (Kasi et al. 2008) conducted a Delphi study to find what
experienced IT practitioners see as the most important barriers to conducting postmortem
evaluations. Among the types of challenges to successful post-mortem
evaluations found in the study was the lack of adequate data. „Hard data‟ about a project
can help focus discussion in post-mortem evaluations (Collier et al. 1996). These
findings point to the significance of capturing project data that is relevant for team
members‟ learning, and the need to facilitate reflection by having participants construct
knowledge representations in a way perceived as feasible and meaningful.
Information relevant to a work process can be captured from tools and artifacts already
used to support that work process. The use of logs from a code management system to
support coordination in a SD team has been proposed (Fitzpatrick et al. 2006). In that
study, an event notification system and a tickertape tool for CVS (Concurrent Versions
System, a popular version control system) messages was integrated with the code
management system, improving communication in the team. The project memory tool
Hipikat was designed to help new members of a distributed SD team learn from more
experienced colleagues (Cubranic et al. 2004). The memory contains the artifacts
produced during development and is built by the tool with little or no changes to the
existing work practices. Tools for systematically capturing design rationale have been
developed, e.g. IBIS (Conklin and Yakemovic 1991) and SEURAT (Burge and Brown
2008). SEURAT captures design rationale in software development and can also trace
requirements and decisions (Burge and Kiper 2008) in a project. (Omoronyia et al.
2009) outline an approach in which awareness support for software development is
provided through an awareness model derived from data originating in developers‟
interaction in the shared workspace. Some approaches to capturing data from a work
process involve users‟ deliberate tagging (performed as an integral part of the work
process) of information relevant to others (Dekel and Herbsleb 2008; Storey et al.
2005).
SE student projects represent a work and learning setting in which tool usage is
dominated by lightweight technology. As part of their use in day-to-day work, these
tools capture data (e.g. in logs, archives and various types of overviews) that may be of
use to aid reflection by the teams on their project process. The potential of collaboration
tools to aid project reflection through team members‟ examination of historical data can
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