Team resilience in distributed student projects

Abstract

Global software engineering education is steadily advancing to fully prepare students for future challenges at work, by providing opportunities for real-life experiences, especially in distributed project-based courses. These international student teams are, as in real companies, susceptible to various risks stemming from different internal and external factors, being the sources of stress and impacting team resilience. In this paper, we focus on studying the resilience of teams affected by two adversities specific to project team composition and project dynamics. The first, internal one, is the teams' ability to compensate for the missing efforts of its non-contributing members in a distributed project environment. The second, external, is the ability to cope with changes of customer requirements, which can be real, or just perceived by the team members. Based on the empirical data, acquired from a number of Distributed Software Development course instances, we identify different sub-factors of these two risks and analyze the correlations of these elements to the final project evaluations, more specifically on the evaluation of both the final product and project process.