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

The work-reflection-learning cycle in SE student projects: Use of collaboration tools
In 2006, empirical studies were conducted at NITH and at NTNU. A longitudinal study
of a NITH team involving some days of recorded observation over a semester was
useful because it informed the focus of further research, but the study itself did not
produce results that were published. The study reported in P1 addressed crosscommunity
collaboration in capstone SE projects with external customers, drawing on
data from semi-structured interviews with project students and customers in the
undergraduate SE project course PJ501 at NITH, and interviews with customers from
the NTNU project course IT2901 which was found to be similar enough to allow a
combination of data across the courses. The study was conducted in collaboration with
Bendik Bygstad at NITH.
Team V at NTNU was identified as a particularly interesting case of instant messaging
(IM) use, experiencing highly problematic team-customer collaboration over this
medium. Based on the IM log and follow-up interviews with the project manager and
the customer, the findings were reported in P3.
Data from the 2006 studies also informed a theoretical reflection paper (Krogstie and
Divitini 2007) on how the projects can be seen as a case of mobile learning, the
scaffolding of which should focus on boundary objects between interacting
communities (see Appendix B).
From 2007 on, all data were collected from the project course IT2901 at NTNU. A
longitudinal field study was conducted with Team A (Figure 7). It was made clear to the
team that I would have no role in the evaluation of their work and provide no
supervision. The study involved 75 hours of naturalistic observation of work sessions
and meetings with project stakeholders. Data collection included field notes, photos and
audio recordings from the observed work sessions, the team‟s email communication,
artifacts involved in the project work, project documentation at various stages of
development, follow-up interviews with the customer and the team right after the
project, and two team members reading through a draft version of P2. Brokering
towards an OSS development community was identified as a topic for P2, and as part of
the analysis the field notes were used to create a chronology of project events.
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