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

The work-reflection-learning cycle in SE student projects: Use of collaboration tools
in the typical challenges of SE and collaborative project work. Some initial ideas for
how this could be achieved include: training course staff to provide advice on this topic;
conducting introductory lectures; arranging workshops where students from different
groups compare their experiences, and addressing the topic of collaboration tool use in
retrospective reflection workshops during the semester. How the topic of collaboration
tool use may be more consciously addressed in SE project courses deserves systematic
and empirical research by SE education practitioners.
The thesis shows some cases of collaboration tool use in which cross-community
collaboration entails a relatively high degree of participation in the other community,
for example when a project customer gets his own page in a project team‟s wiki, or in
the case of OSS participation by a project team, through an internet developer forum. In
the context of SE student projects, further research could address the questions of when
such participation in the other community is appropriate and what it takes for it to
succeed, specifically addressing the role of collaboration tools. The concepts of CoP,
brokering and boundary objects might be useful in the analysis. The research could be
done within SE education, TEL or CSCW.
Another task for further research in SE education is to adapt the retrospective reflection
workshop approach outlined in the thesis, with or without the use of historical data in
collaboration tools, to the needs of specific courses. This should be considered and
conducted as design research and not merely „use‟ of research results. The outcomes
should be improvement of the specific project courses as well as guidelines and
templates for the organizing of retrospective reflection workshops in SE student
projects. The more systematic use of issue trackers in retrospective reflection in a larger
number of teams should be explored. An important aspect of adapting the approaches to
specific courses is the integration of reflection into the development processes (e.g. as
done in SCRUM and other agile development methodologies). This implies making
reflection part of a process improvement effort and conducting reflection workshops
several times during the project. In each workshop, not only should the teams
collaboratively determine what are main lessons learned, they should define a set of
action items to be implemented in their subsequent work. Accordingly, empirical
research on reflection in the projects should investigate the teams‟ actual use of, and
benefit from, the outcomes of reflection. Comparing data from several reflection
workshops in a project might provide useful data in this respect. This could be
supplemented by longitudinal observation of work in the team with a focus on the
follow-up of action items.
In PBL in other domains of education, a similar way of organizing retrospective
reflection can be adapted and tried out. The results of such studies should be best
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