Using personality inventories to help form teams for software engineering class projects
Proceedings of the 6th annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
Large team projects in software engineering courses
Proceedings of the 36th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Functional group roles in software engineering teams
HSSE '05 Proceedings of the 2005 workshop on Human and social factors of software engineering
Personality types, learning styles, and an agile approach to software engineering education
Proceedings of the 37th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Using a roles scheme to derive software project metrics
Proceedings of the 2004 workshop on Quantitative techniques for software agile process
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Team-based software development projects can be an important component of an undergraduate computer science experience. Student teams sometimes fail, however, due to inadequate initiative, communication, and organization. Students used to individual work often do not recognize the extent of the coordination required to get their team operating in tandem, and in many cases may be reluctant to initiate such coordination for fear of appearing "bossy" to their teammates. We attempted to solve some of these problems by appointing a "team lead" to each project team in a pair of junior-level design courses. The role of the team lead was described as an organizer, initiator, meeting planner, and central point of communication with the instructor. The idea was that explicitly designating one group member to monitor project management tasks would improve communication and awareness within the team, while relieving team members of the awkwardness of volunteering themselves. We found that there were a variety of ways that teams interpreted and applied this role, but that on the whole it did in fact result in high-performing teams. Students themselves (in anonymous surveys) reported that their level of communication and awareness of project status was high throughout the semester, and believed that the concept was helpful to their team's performance.