Understanding individual contribution and collaboration in student software teams

Software development is an inherently team-based activity, and many software-engineering courses are structured around team projects, in order to provide students with an authentic learning experience. The collaborative-development tools through which student developers define, share and manage their tasks generate a detailed record in the process. Albeit not designed for this purpose, this record can provide the instructor with insights into the students´ work, the team´s progress over time, and the individual team-member´s contributions. In this paper, we describe an analysis and visualization toolkit that enables instructors to interactively explore the trace of the team´s collaborative work, to better understand the team dynamics, and the tasks of the individual team developers. We also discuss our grounded-theory analysis of one team´s work, based on their email exchanges, questionnaires and interviews. Our analyses suggest that the inferences supported by our toolkit are congruent with the developers´ feedback, while there are some discrepancies with the reflections of the team as a whole.