Monitoring team progress in a software engineering project class

One of the most challenging tasks of teaching an undergraduate software engineering team project course is monitoring the progress of individual teams. At Arizona State University (USA), their undergraduate software engineering class is routinely taught with 50 students broken into 10 software development teams. The teams work on a realistic project for 15 weeks beginning with the development of a requirements document and ending with acceptance testing of a fully documented product. The challenge for the instructor is to monitor the progress of each of the teams as well as their individual members. Ideally metrics should also be gathered providing both the instructor and individual teams with quantitative comparative information. To facilitate the monitoring of project teams, the authors have developed a system that has evolved over the last 10 years. The system consists of individual weekly progress reports, team meeting reports, frequent incremental deliverables from both individuals and teams and metrics. The metrics provide information on both individuals and teams. This paper describes in detail their monitoring system and provides examples of actual metrics collected from their courses. In addition, they describe and make available software for automating the monitoring process. This software provides an easy interface for both individuals and teams to enter timely information necessary for instructor monitoring. It provides the instructor with excellent visibility of team activities. It also enables teams to compare their metrics with that of other teams in an anonymous fashion. For example, a team might compare the time they have spent in meetings with that of other teams.