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

Software Engineering student projects: state-of-the-art
be examined in an informal way by having team members browse historical data as part
of a post-mortem interview about their project. Such a study is reported in P5.
A recent study found that in SD projects, data repositories from the development
process (bug databases and email repositories) could help researchers reconstruct the
bug fixing „stories‟, but the data were not complete and correct enough to get the full
story deemed necessary to understand and support coordination of the SD work (Aranda
and Venolia 2009). One of the biggest problems with the repository data was missing
links from the bug records to the source code involved. Also, even with a bug database
and email repositories in combination, it turned out to be difficult to unveil the full
network of participants involved in the process, and clearly see who had been doing
what. The researchers got the full story of the bug fixing, with its social, organizational
and technical aspects, by eliciting the knowledge of the participants in interviews.
The use of historical data in collaboration tools to support reflection can be explored by
incorporating such use of data into reflection efforts organized as part of the work
practice. This is in line with the pedagogical rationale of project based learning. In this
thesis, the empirical study presented in P7 and P8 combines the timeline and
satisfaction curve project retrospective approach with the use of historical data in a
collaboration tool (i.e. an issue tracker) to investigate what may be the benefit of
introducing the tool in this setting. P5 also explores the use of historical data in
retrospective reflection, but framed within a tool-mediated post-mortem interview about
the project.
In the research literature on learning there are many models outlining learning cycles
from an educational or organizational perspective. Some of these models assign a key
role to knowledge representations (see Section 2.2). However, to the knowledge of this
author, none of these models outline the use of collaboration tools applied in the work
process as collectors and sources of data about the work process to be used in reflection
on that process. With the aid of a distributed cognition perspective, this challenge is
undertaken in P7 and P8 in the thesis.
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