Teamscope: Teamwork Made Clear

Teaching software development process is an important component of computer science and engineering education. In practice, processes are used by software development teams to coordinate activities and combine skills[12]. As in social behavior studies, human behaviors in teams are conceptualized as activities, interactions, and sentiments[10]. Software development processes can be both considered as activities (visible actions of individuals and correctness of the execution), and interactions (connectedness of two or more people regardless of the activities). The activity aspect of a process can be quantitatively measured (for example, the velocity of a team can be measured by the number of features developed). However, processes as interactions are more difficult to measure. The goal of Teamscope is to provide visualizations that help understand both the activity and interaction aspect. Visualization has its advantage over traditional evaluation methods in terms of validity, reliability and scalability. In classrooms, processes are measured mainly through surveys, questionnaires, interviews and human observations[6][14][7]. In all cases, validity and reliability of the evaluation result can be undermined by various reasons. For example, the evaluation can be biased by perspectives of evaluator[9]. Some studies address this problem by having several graders grading the same project[9][7], and/or having various data sources[7]. However, these methods also come with an increased amount of human power and expert time, and thus undermine the scalability of the class. Teamscope is designed to support instructors to give valid evaluation to processes in scale. It provides visualizations that presents the execution of processes in a clear and transparent way, so that violations of processes can be noticed by instructors. Teamscope is built upon several software development tools that are widely recognized in the software engineering community. Tools such as GitHub1, PivotalTracker2, Travis CI3, Slack4, and Code Climate5 (see Table 1 for detailed descriptions) are infrastructure for software development. We believe data from these tools combined can be used as a profile of the team project and the team itself. Teamscope collects data available from these data sources, synthesizes and analyzes following well-established practices in software engineering community, and presents the information to instructors, so that the instructor can have an objective and comprehensive profile of the project, and thus to design intervention accordingly.