Project work division in agile distributed student teams: who develops what?

This paper focuses on studying how distributed student teams organize their project work on a software product and how is their work division related to their architectural choices and geographical locations. We present our findings based on the data collected during five years of the long-lasting Distributed Software Development course running among three European universities. Student team decisions are analyzed on 19 distributed projects, carried out using the Scrum framework, and students' insights into this topic are discussed based on the data obtained from students' questionnaires and other course-related data sources. In addition, we investigate how this work division is related to the team dynamics, by analyzing teams' collaboration patterns and collaboration links between different team locations and work roles. The results show that although the students, in general, perceive the strong positive influence of architecture to the work division, younger generations of students tend to move away from dividing the work by location in order to form the sub-teams mixed by location, thus even improving the performance of their projects. A balanced collaboration, regardless of the physical location of sub-teams, might have a more beneficial effect on the quality of the resulting work than a strict work division over a distance.