Psychographd: A Team Building Platform For Software Engineering Students

A new criteria-driven team building software is designed specifically for Computer Science or Software Engineering students. This research intends to find whether the cohesiveness in the student capstone project teams improves when the teams are built using the proposed courseware, named Psychographd as compared to when teams are built through random assignment. The criteria for the software are based on the findings of the doctoral thesis of the lead author. The teams are built on the basis of the results of criteria-centric self-evaluation questionnaire built into the software, which each student will have to answer so as to be considered a candidate for a team. Two hundred students had participated in this research; out of these 200, 100 students had used Psychographd for forming teams and the other 100 students had formed teams through random assignments. Cohesion is measured and compared in the teams that were formed using the Psychographd and those that had not used Psychographd; for measuring the cohesiveness in teams, modified Group Environment Questionnaire is used. A sharp increase in the cohesion among the team members is reported for the teams that were formed using the Psychographd. Some unique features of the Psychographd are (a) 128 research based criteria for team formation (b) elimination of the chances of occurrence of "orphan student" problem (c) multiple team alternatives for each student.