Modeling teamwork in an academic environment

Abstract

Teaching software engineering is a challenge, mostly because students should have come up against practical problems to be able to understand the important concepts of the field. Unfortunately, a factory environment (through training courses) can bear out the problems but does not ensure a good pedagogic management whereas an academic environment provides a pedagogic management but does not meet the requirements in software developments of industrial size. This paper presents our experiment: the teamwork project. It tries to deal with the preceding difficulty in our academic environment.

The first part of the paper presents the aim a software engineering course should try to reach from our point of view: namely, teaching students to build and manage coherent and evolving structures. The different kinds of structures are discussed.

The second part presents the teamwork project. The main idea is to consider this project as a scale model whose parameters can be exhibited and modified actively by the students. Then our emphasis is not on the delivery of a product but on the building of a well-running and efficient team of more than ten members.