Teamwork Improvement in Group Projects of Professional Software Development

Software engineering (SE) is an essential subject taught in the curriculum of Computing Science (CS) in Higher Education. It trains students in the knowledge of software development life cycle (SDLC), and develops them practical skills on how to efficiently develop software projects. Team-based learning is widely adopted in SE subjects to emulate the real world SDLC scenarios. It provides perceived benefits in teaching students to overcome the challenges that come with teamwork. This paper critiques the current methods of teamwork adopted by two SE modules, Project Software Development (PSD) and Team Project (TP) offered to CS cohorts in our university. Several limitations have been identified in the current framework, including a lack of diverse personalities within teams, lack of a comprehensive peer evaluation scheme and lack of a close relationship with academic supervisors of group projects. We explore alternative learning frameworks to better cultivate teamwork abilities in students. Three proposed ideas aim to address these limitations in teamwork, that are inspired by prior works for similar problems. Experiments and surveys regarding teamwork are conducted among the CS students in these two SE modules. Experiment results approve our three hypotheses on the improvement of teamwork in the learning of PSD and TP