Understanding students’ software development projects: Effort, performance, satisfaction, skills and their relation to the adequacy of outcomes developed

Given the inclusion of (often team-based) course projects in tertiary software engineering education, it is necessary to investigate software engineering curricula and students’ experiences while undergoing their software engineering training. Previous research efforts have not sufficiently explored students perceptions around the commitment and adequacy of effort spent on software engineering projects, their project performance and skills that are developed during course projects. This gap in skills awareness includes those that are necessary, anticipated and learned, and the challenges to student project success, which may predict project performance. Such insights could inform curricula design, theory and practice, in terms of improving post-study software development success. We conducted a survey involving undergraduate across four universities in New Zealand and Cyprus to explore these issues, where extensive deductive and inductive analyses were performed. Among our findings we observe that students’ commitment of effort on software engineering project seems appropriate. Students are more satisfied with their team’s collaboration performance than technical contributions, but we found that junior students seemed to struggle with teamwork. Further, we observe that the software students developed were of higher quality if they had worked in project teams previously, had stronger technical skills and were involved in timely meetings. This study singles out mechanisms for informing good estimation of effort, mentoring technical competencies and suitable coaching for enhancing project success and student learning. •Project workload could be heavy in student settings, at times up to 17 hours/week.•Teams are more satisfied with collaboration performance than technical contributions.•Junior team members particularly struggle with the pressures of teamwork.•Software quality is linked to teams’ familiarity, tech. skills and timely meetings.•Preoccupation with technical skills may limit the development of useful soft skills.