Students' selection of teamwork tools in software engineering education: Lessons learned

Software work is normally developed in groups. As a result, there is a need to develop teamwork competence in related activities such as, software engineering education. In higher education educational settings, courses often propose several tools for student groups to either guide or support their work. In this paper, authors present main results and lessons learned from courses on software engineering. Specifically, the aim of this paper is the study of the selection and the adoption of software engineering tools by students working in teams, in the context of a software engineering course. The purpose of the study is analysing the students' decision making process and reasoning strategies to such selection. In this scenario, driven by a project based learning approach, a qualitative study on the use of specific tools to support group work was conducted. Results reveal that students demonstrate a rational decision making process based on logical efficient reasoning. As consequence six lessons have been learned: everything in one place; the new over the known; freedom over imposition; performance and freedom; social influence and secondary role of project management. In addition, these six lessons have been compared with previous literature in the topic and backing them up with main theories in the field. Finally, authors reflect on the implications of such lessons learned analyzing deeply aspects like freedom of choice, performance, tools features, imposition and social influence, to bring a set of grounded argumentations to the reader.