The Development of a Dashboard Tool for Visualising Online Teamwork Discussions

Abstract

Many software development organisations today adopt global software engineering (GSE) and agile models, requiring software engineers to collaborate and develop software in flexible, distributed, online teams. However, many employers have expressed concern that graduates lack teamwork skills and one of the most commonly occurring problems with GSE models are issues with project management. Team managers and educators often oversee a number of teams and the large corpus of data, in combination with agile models, make it difficult to efficiently assess factors such as team role distribution and emotional climate. Current methods and tools for monitoring software engineering (SE) teamwork in both industry and education settings typically focus on member contributions, reflection, or product outcomes, which are limited in terms of real-time feedback and accurate behavioural analysis. We have created a dashboard that extracts and communicates team role distribution and team emotion information in real-time. Our proof of concept provides a real-time analysis of teamwork discussions and visualises team member emotions, the roles they have adopted and overall team sentiment during the course of a collaborative problem-solving project. We demonstrate and discuss how such a tool could be useful for SE team management and training and the development of teamwork skills in SE university courses.