Managing And Assessing Software Engineering Group Projects

While the benefits of assigning group projects are numerous, managing and evaluating them can sometimes become daunting tasks. Among the biggest challenges include determining individual grades for group members and attempting to reflect the “real world” by mixing up the makeup of each group and the tasks to be completed. After trying various approaches and styles for more than a decade, I think that I have developed a useful pedagogy for managing group projects, one that attempts to allow each student to work on different parts of different projects, with a different group of students, over the course of the semester. This approach also gives the students several opportunities to evaluate their own individual work, the work of their teammates, the work of their own group, and the work of another group. These evaluations play a major role in helping me to assign grades to the group as a whole, as well as to each individual member of the group.