Managing and evaluating team projects in software engineering education

Abstract

The students should also acquire team working skills along their individual skills during their software engineering education. Even though courses and senior projects that require team work provide such experience, various problems emerge during their execution and evaluation. Most common problems come from the varying degrees of contributions from team members and the difficulty for the lecturer to measure and reflect these contributions to the grades. This paper presents the Task Point System and its results during its application to a project developed by different teams and the evaluation of the students in these teams in the "Software Project Management" course. With this system, both the students and the lecturer can create tasks and set appropriate points for them. At the end of the term the task points are used to calculate individual grades. Task Point System has been applied to 20 teams made up of 96 students for a semester during the "Software Project management" course. The tangible contributions of team members are acquired and reflected to the grades for each student in the teams.