A Software Engineering Capstone Course Facilitated By GitHub Templates

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 2022/23 we observed 24% of commits happening on the due dates. After partially introducing the above ideas in 2023/24, this number improved to 18%. To measure the fairness we introduce a fairness measure based on the disparity between number of commits between all pairs of teammates. Going forward we propose an experiment where commit data and interview data is compared between teams that use the proposed interventions and those that do not.