Cross-community collaboration and learning in customer-driven software engineering student projects

This paper explores collaboration and learning between stakeholders in customer-driven student projects. The research objectives are to obtain empirically based knowledge on how students relate to stakeholders in customer driven projects, and to suggest implications for the pedagogical design of the project courses. Empirical data was collected from two Bachelor courses in software engineering at two learning institutions in Norway. To make sense of the interaction between the three stakeholders in the project: the student groups, the university and the customer, we build on Wenger's concept of communities of practice and on the concept of boundary objects. Our analysis highlights that students, through practical experience in the projects, learn to balance the requirements and expectations from different stakeholders in designing a working technical solution - a valuable skill for software engineers. We argue that for students to learn to balance stakeholders' interests in the best possible way, visibility of stakeholders' goals should be focused throughout the projects. Explicit reference to the goals should be incorporated into project artifacts serving as boundary objects. Collaboration technologies providing standard shared workspace functionality are seen as adequate to support this.