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

The work-reflection-learning cycle in SE student projects: Use of collaboration tools
be seen as boundary objects. This perspective helps identify challenges and learning
potential associated with student teams‟ interaction with the different stakeholders, and
what support might be adequate to help the student teams in this interaction.
The paper ends with the recommendation that in the organization of the course and
supervision of the projects one should put explicit focus on the role and purpose of
project artifacts serving a role as boundary objects. Consciousness of the purpose of
such artifacts helps shed light on stakeholders‟ different objectives for project
participation and the potential role of the artifacts in supporting these objectives – two
issues that are, as shown in P1, frequently unclear to the students. As an example,
students typically regard some project artifacts as „school‟ deliverables and some as
„real‟ project artifacts relevant to the customer. Documentation of the product, for
example, conceptual models describing possible use scenarios, are frequently taken by
the students as belonging to the first category, but may in fact be useful when the
customer wants to continue developing the product. An open discussion between team
and customer about such issues may benefit collaboration and the project result. The
current use of a number of different collaboration tools in the projects point to a
potential for providing shared access among the collaborating stakeholders to boundary
objects and descriptions of the role and design of these objects
It is further proposed in P1 that if the students are fully aware of the purpose and role of
an artifact in collaboration, they may be allowed to determine for themselves (in
collaboration with the other stakeholder) what is the appropriate form and content of the
artefact. This contrasts with the mandatory use of pre-specified templates for, for
example, product requirements or status reports.
5.2 P2: Power through brokering. OSS participation in SE
projects
Author: Krogstie, Birgit
Published in: Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering
(ICSE) 2008
Many software engineering projects use open source software tools or components. The project team’s
active participation in the open source community may be necessary for the team to use the technology.
Based on an in-depth field study of industry software engineering project students interacting with an
open source community, we find that participation in the community may affect the team’s work and
learning by strengthening the power of the broker between the team and the community. We outline
pitfalls and benefits of having student teams acquire development-related knowledge from open source
communities. The findings are relevant to the organization and supervision of software engineering
student projects interacting with open source communities.
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