Collaborative and teamwork software development in an undergraduate software engineering course

Two key elements of modern software development are collaboration and teamwork. Current methodologies (e.g., agile) and platforms are based on these key elements. This paper describes our experience in stimulating collaboration and teamwork activities of students in the context of a software engineering course at the third year of an undergraduate program in computer science at the University of Milano-Bicocca in Italy. The students were asked to develop a software project in teams of 3 to 5 students for the final exam of the course. The students used GitHub as a collaborative software development platform. In addition, they analyzed the quality of the developed software through SonarQube. The students were also asked to perform project management tasks (e.g., the Gantt) using the Microsoft Project tool. At the end of the course, we gathered the student feedback through a questionnaire on their collaboration and teamwork experience (through GitHub and Microsoft Project tools) and on the use of a software analysis assessment tool, i.e., SonarQube. From their feedback, the students were enthusiastic about working in teams for their project development and about learning how to use tools which are exploited not only in the academic world but also in industry.