Communication challenges in distributed student projects

Abstract

Student projects have been widely adopted in software engineering education. Project teams are composed of students in the same institution, and students can meet and communicate face-to-face regularly. The Covid-19 pandemic, however, forced the student projects to rapidly transition to remote mode and adapt to the virtual team. Virtual teams in distributed environments face challenges due to distance factors that separate collaborators from each other. This study aims at investigating the communication challenges student teams encountered and managed to overcome. We report on an analysis of data collected from reports and interviews in the software project course delivered in fall 2020. There were 57 participants, forming 10 project teams in the study. The results show that remote work negatively affects the social aspects of project teams, especially early communication difficulties in a project. The teams were able to handle most identified challenges but had less interest in tackling those that they did not see as a risk to project completion, which would have most likely caused problems in real-world projects. This study improves understanding of communication challenges in student project teams and the findings serve as a resource for course teachers to design student project courses in the context of virtual teams.