Assessing Teamwork Performance in Software Engineering Education: A Case in a Software Engineering Undergraduate Course

Abstract

Teamwork skills are important and even essential for software engineering professionals. Although there are rich research results on teamwork skill development and assessment in other engineering disciplines, more research is required on effective approaches in software engineering education as teamwork plays a more fundamental role with some special requirements. This paper presents a novel assessment approach for teamwork performance in software engineering education. The approach has been used in several software engineering courses and the results are positive and promising. A novel feature of the approach is that it encourages and supports student active and collaborative learning by using an approach specially assessing teamwork performance of a team and each team member of the team. Another feature is that it can be tailored to different requirements and software engineering courses. We illustrate the approach by a case that uses the approach in software project management course. Limitations of the approach and further work are also discussed.