An Educational Testbed for the Computational Analysis of Collaboration in Early Stages of Software Development Processes

Agile software development processes are widely adopted in software engineering projects. Their low organizational overhead and iterative nature make them ideal choices for small development teams. The application of those methods in software projects that require collaboration between multiple sub-teams is a challenging task that remains subject to intensive research. Especially the initial phases of such projects are crucial for project success since a problem-free inception period generates a basis for efficient development later in the process. We introduce a testbed that allows analyzing collaboration processes during those early stages of software development within a low-risk, educational setup. Participants of a software engineering lecture form development teams of considerable size and develop real-life applications in a realistic, yet controlled, environment. By combining manual observations with the computational analysis of digital collaboration artifacts we are able to gain insights into distinctive patterns of collaboration activity and reason about their triggers within the process setup.