The development and trial of SEGWorld: a virtual environment for software engineering student group work

Software engineering tasks, during both development and maintenance, typically involve teamwork using computers. Team members rarely work on isolated computers. An underlying assumption of our research is that software engineering teams will work more effectively if adequately supported by network-based groupware technology and project management tools. This research is investigating the provision of such network-based support for software engineering teams. The immediate objective is to provide network-based support, specifically for students working on software engineering group (SEG) projects in the Department of Computer Science at Durham. The long term objectives are to develop more flexible support for group working among computer science students and their staff supervisors for project work and tutorials in general. This paper reports on our recent results and assesses how far we have been successful in achieving our immediate objective.