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

Results
The background of P2 is a longitudinal study conducted with Team A in 2007. The
team‟s interaction with an open source software (OSS) developer community was
essential to the project‟s success. The paper gives a chronological account of the
project, focusing on the team‟s need for knowledge about an OSS development
framework they were required to use and how they approached the challenge of
acquiring this knowledge. This happened via confusion and hesitation through direct
contact with the developer community in the web forum and subsequent participation in
that community. The participation helped the team get the necessary resources for their
development and succeed with their project. The team‟s requests for functionality in the
development framework needed for their project led the OSS community to make
changes to the development framework itself.
The findings point to some pitfalls and benefits for SE education of having students
participate in OSS communities. Being a realistic aspect of modern SE work, OSS
community participation in a capstone project provides work experience highly relevant
to industry. The team member having the role as broker between the team and the
community is likely to be motivated by his/her role as an important contributor to the
team‟s work and possibly also as a contributor to the open source community.
Motivation and pride may be shared by the entire team, as seen in P2. On the other
hand, there are some pitfalls in projects depending on direct interaction with an OSS
community. Student teams may hesitate to try and participate actively, being in doubt
about their own skills and credibility, and this may cause problematic project delays.
Attempts to interact with the OSS community may fail if the team does not manage to
convince the community that they qualify as real users and potential contributors. The
OSS community becomes an extra project stakeholder to which the project has to relate,
which makes project management more challenging. For instance, participating on the
OSS arena and working on technical issues there – and receiving gratification for the
effort from other participants there – may move the focus from project tasks in need of
attention. Finally, brokering may be performed inadequately, for example if knowledge
is not properly shared within the team or the team‟s interests are not properly taken care
of in the OSS community.
Overall, P2 shows how cross-community collaboration in student projects extends the
traditional customer and course staff interaction, with implications for the dynamics and
learning of the team. In particular, successful interaction with an OSS community in an
Internet forum requires a certain communications competence.
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