Coordination and Awareness Mechanisms to Support Collaboration in Project-based Software Engineering Courses.

In project-based software engineering courses, the collaboration among participants is usually the cornerstone that makes these experiences successful and allows reaching the courses’ instructional goals. Prescribing a collaboration process for these courses is not appropriate, since their workflows are ad hoc framed; i.e., most of their activities are defined on-the-fly by the participants, according to their current context and needs. Therefore, only coordination and awareness mechanisms can be defined at the course design time, in order to support and promote collaboration among participants during these courses. This article presents a qualitative study that identifies and relates these coordination and awareness mechanisms, and embeds them in a set of software ceremonies. Course instructors and instructional designers can take advantage of these results, not only to identify design decision points, but also coordination and awareness mechanisms to promote collaboration in this type of courses.