Improving Software Engineering Teamwork with Structured Feedback
Victor Weiqi Huang, Kori L. Krueger, Taya R. Cohen, Michael L. Hilton · 2024
Teamwork is a key learning outcome for our course, Foundations of Software Engineering. However, conflicts are inevitable in teams, and if students cannot resolve conflicts, this can lead to decreased satisfaction for everyone on the team. In this experience report, we present our approach to help students deal with conflicts that can occur in team projects. Working with faculty from the School of Business, following best practices of organizational behaviour research, we instructed students on how to provide high quality peer feedback, and designed activities where students provided feedback to each other following these principles. After this intervention, we compared the results of our teamwork survey with the results from the previous semester. We saw a meaningful drop in teamwork problems directly after the intervention, and the effect persisted for the rest of the semester.