1. Groupware to Support Distributed & Collocated Software Engineering Student Group Projects Sarah Drummond RISE Dept. Computer Science University of Durham

2. Presentation Overview F Distributed SE group project: –Objectives of “Developing a Virtual Community for Student Groupwork” –Infrastructure: synchronous and asynchronous F Collocated group projects @ Durham –the use of BSCW F Lessons Learnt F Future direction

3. Objectives of the JTAP project “ Developing a Virtual Community for Student Groupwork” F to give students experience of working collaboratively in geographically distributed teams to carry out software engineering tasks using modern group-working technologies F to develop staff experience of operating distributed collaborative projects and to disseminate experience to enable such projects to be implemented successfully in other institutions

4. Pilot case studies - phase 1 F evaluation of groupware F 12 groups of 3 students - video conferencing F 3 different software engineering tasks - 2hr each F questionnaires and observations Student projects - phase 2 F part of student final year projects; customer-defined F involved 7 weeks of collaboration, plus 2 face-to-face meetings F each project group to produce a database system specification, development and documentation F questionnaires and observations

5. Lessons learned F the usability of the various technologies (video, audio, chat, white-board) assessed, and the applicability of each identified F tasks completed adequately –more training necessary –technology not robust enough (video conferencing) F distributed work –face-to-face meetings essential for success F need to establish protocols for distributed working F little groupware is available which specifically supports software engineering although general purpose support for group communication are effectively used for distributed working

6. Software Engineering Group (SEG) projects at Durham F Development of software through the phases of the software lifecycle F 15 week duration F Approx. 84 students = 14 groups of 6 or 7 F One tutor/customer per group F Strict deadlines for group deliverables (all written in HTML) at each phase.

7. SEG: Work so far... F Dedicated SEG collaborative working laboratory “SEGWorld” F Creation of a virtual environment for student group work “SEGWorld” based on BSCW (Basic Support for Cooperative Work) F On-line tutorials and course work materials

8. What is BSCW? F A document storage and retrieval system supporting collaborative information retrieval therefore supporting the work of widely dispersed work-groups F Runs on UNIX (incl. Linux) and NT OS F Supports independent platforms via a WWW interface F Consists of a server which maintains index of all workspaces it manages.

9. What is BSCW? (2) F Users access system using standard user- name/password and server responds with a list of workspaces the user can enter. Each workspace contains a number of shared objects F Actions can be performed on these objects by workspace members F Hierarchical file structure F A notification service keeps users aware of each others activities

10. Summary of results F SEGWorld provides: –central repository –simple work-flow mechanism –awareness of other members activities –functionality to support some SE activities –practical experience of using groupware F Problems! –performance –initial motivation poor - lack of experience –inconsistent/non-use of functions

11. Where to from here? F No distributed projects F Continued use of shared workspace –upgrade –performance issues addressed F Continued improvement in introduction of SEGWorld and associated tutorial F CGI scripts to semi-automate on-line marking F Introduction of CSCW module in curriculum

12. Further information F SEG web pages: http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dcs8s00 F SEG publications: http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dcs1sad/papers F BSCW: http://bscw.gmd.de