"Is My Mic On?" Preparing SE Students for Collaborative Remote Work and Hybrid Team Communication

TL;DR

This paper investigates how industry-standard communication tools are used in software engineering to better prepare students for remote and hybrid team collaboration post-pandemic.

Contribution

It provides insights into industry communication practices and explores how integrating these tools into education can enhance student readiness for remote work.

Findings

Industry SE teams extensively use Slack, Miro, and GitHub Discussions.

Students traditionally rely on face-to-face communication, but pandemic-induced shifts require tool adoption.

Enhanced training on communication tools improves student collaboration skills.

Abstract

Communication is essential for the success of student and professional software engineering (SE) team development projects. The projects delivered by SE courses provide valuable learning experiences for students because they teach industry-required skills such as teamwork, communication, and scheduling. Professional SE teams have adopted communication software such as Slack, Miro, Microsoft Teams, and GitHub Discussions to share files and convey information between team members. Likewise, they have distributed software development tools such as Visual Studio CodeSpaces and Jira to support productivity. In contrast, within academia, students have focused on having face-to-face meetings for team communication and communication tools for file sharing. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, universities have been forced to switch to an online or hybrid modality abruptly, thus compelling SE students to quickly adopt communication software. This paper proposes a study on the use of communication software in industry to prepare students for remote software development positions after graduation.