Encouraging interaction and status awareness in undergraduate software engineering projects: The role of social networking services

As part of the CETL ALiC initiative (Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning: Active Learning in Computing), undergraduate computing science students at Newcastle and Durham universities participate in a year long, inter-institutional group programming assignment. Teams of students act as “virtual companies” and collaborate cross-site to develop software products for real-world industrial clients. This paper investigates the emergence and autonomous adoption of social networking technologies in our students´ communication strategies during the project, and explores the role that “status awareness” (knowledge of the current activities of one´s team mates) had on the outcome of that collaboration. We also present and discuss the findings of a recent trial of CommonGround, an application created to harness our students´ pre-existing engagement with social networking technologies such as Facebook.