Success Factors for Team Project Courses

Team project courses are important elements in most computer science and software engineering programs. For many students, the team project course represents the only non-trivial software development experience before graduation. The team project should be used to introduce them to important project and process issues that otherwise are very difficult to teach. Sloppy documentation, poor project planning and tracking or ineffective communication will eventually affect the teams and teach the students a important lessons for their future work. In this paper, we investigate how students select, carry out and complete their projects. The results show that students tend to select mainstream projects with good specifications and that certain project types are less suitable for the course. The results also show that process related deliverables are crucial to the final outcome of the projects. Among the hardest, but also most important, deliverables we find the project plan