Towards Group Development Stages in Software Engineering Courses Projectwork

Wheelan et al. established that a group of individuals working together towards a common goal goes through four different stages—i.e., Dependency& Inclusion, Counter-dependency & Fighting, Trust & Structure, and Work & Productivity. Such development includes both group structure (e.g., which individual takes which responsibility) and interpersonal processes. Group work projects, spanning several weeks, are common in applied disciplines such as Software Engineering (SE). This is the first step towards validating whether the four stages of group development take place for SE students working together in groups during a semester-long software development project. Moreover, we focus on factors of interest, namely the students' different backgrounds and the new working conditions they had to adapt to due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We carried out a longitudinal survey with 11 students taking part in the group work of a Master-level course in SE at Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden. We used a simplified version of the Likert-scale questionnaire originally proposed by Wheelan et al. as well as open-ended questions. The preliminary analysis of the survey data shows that the four stages of group development do not occur among students working together on a SE project, although later stages are more pronounced than others. These results seem to be impacted to the social aspects of unusual working conditions.