Exploring the gap between the student expectations and the reality of teamwork in undergraduate software engineering group projects

•Students relate to teamwork but not necessarily teamwork in software development.•Breakdown scenario likelihood and student experience are not correlated.•Students must understand the implications of non-engagement to themselves and others. Software engineering group projects aim to provide a nurturing environment for learning about teamwork in software engineering. Since social and teamwork issues have been consistently identified as serious problems in such projects, we aim to better understand the breakdown between the expectations teams have at the start of a group project and their experiences at the end of the project. In this paper, we investigate how 35 teams of undergraduate students approach software engineering group project courses, and how their previous experience with collaborative software development matches their expectations for group work. We then analyse the retrospective documents delivered by the same teams at the end of a 27-week software engineering group project course, mirroring the expectations at the start of the project with the realities described by the end of it.