Media, Mood, and Meetings: Related to Project Success?

This article investigates relationships between media, mood, and communication in teams, and studies how they are related to project success. Team projects are an essential part of the software engineering curriculum. Student teams carry out full software projects, including requirements elicitation...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:ACM transactions on computing education 2015-12, Vol.15 (4), p.1-33
Main Authors: Schneider, Kurt, Liskin, Olga, Paulsen, Hilko, Kauffeld, Simone
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
College Students
Computer Software
Emotional Response
Foreign Countries
Group Dynamics
Interpersonal Communication
Interpersonal Relationship
Meetings
Student Projects
Success
Teamwork
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Summary:This article investigates relationships between media, mood, and communication in teams, and studies how they are related to project success. Team projects are an essential part of the software engineering curriculum. Student teams carry out full software projects, including requirements elicitation, project management, implementation, and testing. This requires various technical skills, but non-technical and psychological aspects are of utmost importance as well, just as in professional software teams. Modern software is often developed by distributed teams. In many cases, team members feel isolated and distant from each other. Indirect communication and inappropriate media create a similar feeling of distance as geographical location. This perceived distance could have an impact on their individual and group moods, and eventually on project success. Therefore, these factors should be considered in educational software engineering team projects. In a longitudinal study at Leibniz Universität Hannover, 20 student teams were observed over a period of 4 months. They were free to schedule team meetings when and where they wanted; and they could use any communication media they chose. Statistical correlations and non-parametric test are used for quantitative empirical analysis. Furthermore, we used analyses of variance for repeated measures to investigate conflicts over time. Results led to a number of recommendations for course organizers. They are interesting for software engineering in general.
ISSN:1946-6226
1946-6226
DOI:10.1145/2771440