A Software Engineering Capstone Course Facilitated By GitHub Templates
Spencer Smith, Christopher William Schankula, Lucas Dutton,, Christopher Kumar Anand

TL;DR
This paper explores using GitHub templates and productivity metrics to improve teamwork and learning quality in software engineering capstone courses, showing initial evidence of more evenly distributed commits.
Contribution
It introduces a structured GitHub template and quantifiable metrics to enhance collaboration and fairness in student team projects, with preliminary positive results.
Findings
Commit on due dates decreased from 24% to 18%.
Proposed fairness measure based on commit disparity.
Initial data suggests improved collaboration fairness.
Abstract
How can instructors facilitate spreading out the work in a software engineering or computer science capstone course across time and among team members? Currently teams often compromise the quality of their learning experience by frantically working before each deliverable. Some team members further compromise their own learning, and that of their colleagues, by not contributing their fair share to the team effort. To mitigate these problems, we propose using a GitHub template that contains all the initial infrastructure a team needs, including the folder structure, text-based template documents and template issues. In addition, we propose each team begins the year by identifying specific quantifiable individual productivity metrics for monitoring, such as the count of meetings attended, issues closed and number of commits. Initial data suggests that these steps may have an impact. In…
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Taxonomy
TopicsDistributed and Parallel Computing Systems
