Teaming is a core component in practically all professional software engineering careers, and as such, is a key skill taught in many undergraduate Computer Science programs. However, not all teams manage to work together effectively, and in education, this can deprive some students of successful teaming experiences. In this work, we seek to gain insights into the characteristics of successful and unsuccessful undergraduate student teams in a software engineering course. We conduct semi-structured interviews with 18 students who have recently completed a team-based software engineering course to understand how they worked together, what challenges they faced, and how they tried to overcome these challenges. Our results show that common problems include communicating, setting and holding to deadlines, and effectively identifying tasks and their relative difficulty. Additionally, we find that self-reflection on what is working and not working or external motivators such as grades help some, but not all, teams overcome these challenges. Finally, we conclude with recommendations for educators on successful behaviours to steer teams towards, and recommendations for researchers on future work to better understand challenges that teams face.

Software testing is an essential skill for computer science students. Prior work reports that students desire support in determining what code to test and which scenarios should be tested. In response to this, we present a lightweight testing checklist that contains both tutorial information and testing strategies to guide students in what and how to test. To assess the impact of the testing checklist, we conducted an experimental, controlled A/B study with 32 undergraduate and graduate students. The study task was writing a test suite for an existing program. Students were given either the testing checklist (the experimental group) or a tutorial on a standard coverage tool with which they were already familiar (the control group). By analyzing the combination of student-written tests and survey responses, we found students with the checklist performed as well as or better than the coverage tool group, suggesting a potential positive impact of the checklist (or at minimum, a non-negative impact). This is particularly noteworthy given the control condition of the coverage tool is the state of the practice. These findings suggest that the testing tool support does not need to be sophisticated to be effective.

Teaming is increasingly a core aspect of professional software engineering and most undergraduate computer science curricula. At NC State University, we teach communication and project-management skills explicitly through a junior-level software engineering course. However, some students may have a dysfunctional team experience that imperils their ability to learn these skills. Identifying these teams during a team project is important so the teaching staff can intervene early and hopefully alleviate the issues.

Test smells are commonly perceived as having a negative impact on software maintainability and correctness. Research has shown that Assertion Roulette is the most pervasive smell in industrial and open-source systems. However, some recent studies argue that the impact of Assertion Roulette is not as severe as previously believed, and developers usually consider it acceptable.The controversy over the impact of Assertion Roulette also exists in the area of testing education. To assess the impact of Assertion Roulette, we conducted a controlled empirical study with 42 CS students. We recruited participants from two populations, CS1 and a graduate testing course, to see what role experience may have in terms of this test smell’s impact. Participants were tasked with implementing a project in Java that passes provided JUnit tests. Through analysis of student-authored source code, we measured the impact of Assertion Roulette using code quality measures and testing behavior measures. Our findings show that the impact of Assertion Roulette on students in this study was minimal. Though students with exposure to the test smell began testing significantly later, they performed similarly in terms of programming quality measures. Thus, it would seem the Assertion Roulette smell is no longer a smell at all, even for less experienced populations like students.

Team-based projects are increasingly used within software engineering education because they can teach valuable communication and collaboration skills to help prepare students for professional software engineering positions. However, team-based projects are not without their downsides: in particular, poor communication or a lack of participation can endanger the success of the project. We propose identifying metrics and building a predictive model to help instructors detect when teams are facing harmful dynamics, and evaluations to assess the metrics and their impact on teams in undergraduate software engineering courses.