A Case Study of Group Communication Patterns in a Large Project Software Engineering Course

Effective communication among members of a software development team is considered to be a critical factor in the success of software projects. Social network analysis is a promising way to analyze communication patterns that has been used in a number of studies of professional software development teams. In this paper, we present preliminary data on communication events collected in a software engineering course and analyze it on a number of measures including basic social network measures. Successful groups are compared to an unsuccessful group on these measures. This is a work in progress report of a project to use social network analysis as a means of studying communication patterns among software engineering students, in order to improve teaching strategies.