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

5 Results
This chapter presents an overview of the results paper by paper. For each paper, the
original abstract is included, followed by a short description of the background for the
research and a brief elaboration on the results.
5.1 P1: Cross-Community Collaboration and Learning in
Customer-Driven Software Engineering Student Projects
Authors: Krogstie, Birgit and Bygstad, Bendik
I was the first author of this paper. Both authors participated in the research design, data
collection, analysis and writing process.
Published in: Proceedings of the 20th Conference on Software Engineering Education
and Training (CSEE&T) 2007
This paper explores collaboration and learning between stakeholders in customer-driven student
projects. The research objectives are to obtain empirically based knowledge on how students relate to
stakeholders in customer-driven projects, and to suggest implications for the pedagogical design of the
project courses. Empirical data was collected from two Bachelor courses in software engineering at two
learning institutions in Norway. To make sense of the interaction between the three stakeholders in the
project: the student groups, the university and the customer, we build on Wenger’s concept of
communities of practice and on the concept of boundary objects. Our analysis highlights that students,
through practical experience in the projects, learn to balance the requirements and expectations from
different stakeholders in designing a working technical solution - a valuable skill for software engineers.
We argue that for students to learn to balance stakeholders’ interests in the best possible way, visibility of
stakeholders’ goals should be focused throughout the projects. Explicit reference to the goals should be
incorporated into project artifacts serving as boundary objects. Collaboration technologies providing
standard shared workspace functionality are seen as adequate to support this.
Based on the authors‟ work experience with capstone SE projects as well as the data
collected in all teams of a capstone project course in 2006, the importance and
mechanisms of cross-community collaboration in the teams emerged as an interesting
issue. Relevant data were collected also from project customers, and the results of the
analysis were presented in P1.
In the paper, SE student projects are considered as a case of cross-community
collaboration. Project artifacts negotiated between the team and other stakeholders can
37