Web-based software engineering education environment supporting collaboration between the teacher side and the student groups

Software development is knowledge-intensive work. In a software project, various types of problems need to be resolved. One approach to acquiring the knowledge necessary for software development in a university education environment is for the students to experience project-based software development. For this kind of education to succeed, collaboration is inevitable between both the teacher side (teacher and teaching assistants) and student groups and within the group membership. This paper describes a collaborative software engineering education environment that in particular focuses on supporting collaboration between the student groups and the teacher side, its application to a real class and the results. The system supports four aspects of collaboration; inspection, acceptance testing, comments attachment for artifacts, and informal communication.