Teamwork Improvement in Group Projects of Professional Software Development

Software engineering (SE) is an essential course in the curriculum of Computing Science (CS) in Higher Education. It trains students in software development theories and practical skills on efficient software designs. It provides perceived benefits in teaching students to overcome the challenges in software projects. This paper critiques the current methods of software engineering education for two SE courses, Project Software Development (PSD) and Team Project (TP) offered to CS cohorts in our university. A TP collaborative programming approach is proposed for software group projects in SE education using various platforms and educational technologies, such as GitHub for source codes repository, cloud servers for software testing, Microsoft One Drive for software documentations, and online shared forms for peer evaluations. Several limitations are identified in the current methods on teamwork, such as a lack of diverse personalities within teams, lack of a comprehensive peer evaluation scheme, and lack of a close relationship with academic advisors. We enhance the TP collaborative programming approach to better cultivate teamwork abilities in students. Three ideas aim to address these limitations in teamwork. Experiments are conducted among the CS students enrolled in these two SE courses, to show improvements of teamwork in the SE education.