| 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. In these courses, student developers define, share and manage their tasks, relying on collaborative-development tools. These tools support all lifecycle activities and generate a detailed record in the process, which can provide valuable insight into the team's work. In this sense, these tools enable instructors to monitor the team's progress and to understand and evaluate the contributions and overall performance of each individual team developer. This thesis describes an analysis and visualization framework, designed to enhance the usefulness of such collaborative tools for instructors, by enabling them to interactively explore interesting facets of the activities and contributions of each individual developer within the team. We have used our framework to analyze and understand how a student team worked through a term project. At the same time, we collected data about the students' own perception of their work processes through individual questionnaires and team interviews. Our analyses suggest that the inferences supported by our framework are congruent with the individual-developer feedback, while there are some discrepancies with the reflections of the team as a whole. Furthermore, in order to improve the learning experience of software engineering students, we studied the human and social aspects of a student team and we developed a grounded theory that helps on the understanding of how students behave during a course project. |
