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

The work-reflection-learning cycle in SE student projects: Use of collaboration tools
Trac, and to incorporate individual sessions preceding the collective one. In the
individual sessions, after the students had constructed their timeline of the project, we
asked them to chronologically browse the timeline on the Trac main page see to see if
this would make them remember events that had not been remembered by memory
alone. This step would make it possible for us to observe differences between team
members in their use of, and benefit from, the historical information; differences that
might be attributed to their different roles in the project.
Findings from the study showed that the historical data accessed through the tool helped
the students remember events or detailed information about events (e.g. their exact
time). Whereas all team members remembered something new to add to the purely
memory-based timeline, the benefit of using Trac retrospectively was bigger for the two
lead programmers than for the other three team members. The event „pre-study coding‟
(e.g. the onset of coding work) was not remembered by anyone prior to use of Trac. The
use of Trac led the two lead programmers to remember and acknowledge that coding
work took place early in the project. In the collective timeline construction, pre-study
coding was brought into the shared timeline and achieved „official status‟ as important
in the team. However, as the follow-up interviews from the study demonstrated, there
were viewpoints among the three other team members on how the pre-study activity
was conducted that were not brought up, probably due to the dominance of the two lead
programmers and their version of what pre-study programming was about. This is
further elaborated in the evaluation of the research process in 7.3.1.
The findings from the study are summarized in three main points about what was
important to make the tool-aided reflection successful: the organization of the workshop
into individual and collaborative steps of knowledge construction with the use of
adequate representations of the project process; the tool features for giving
chronological overview of project events; and the tool features for navigating between
overview and detail. The latter features permitted access from the chronological
overview to there-and-then versions of project artifacts, thus supporting the close
linking of process and product that is characteristic of SE work. Based on the findings,
P8 outlines a set of guiding questions that can be used to help assess the potential of a
collaboration tool to aid reflection on SE work. The questions are intended as a step
towards a framework relating various types of collaboration tools to the aspects of dayto-day
SE work supported by the tools and the potential for the tools to aid retrospective
reflection.
P8 also provides an example of how the reflection model from P7 can be instantiated so
as to comprise selected elements of a specific work-reflection-learning cycle, in this
case focusing on the role of Trac in the case study of P8 (see Figure 15).
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