Highlighting teamwork benefits for computing students and professionals

Luis Fernandez-Sanz, Dept. of Computer Science, Universidad de Alcalá, Spain, luis.fernandezs@uah.es

Raquel Lacuesta, Dept. of Computing and Systems Engineering, Univ. de Zaragoza, Spain, lacuesta@unizar.es
Guillermo Palacios, Dept. of Electron. Eng. and Comm., Univ. de Zaragoza, Spain, guillermo.palacios@unizar.es
Juan José Cuadrado-Gallego, Dept. of Computer Science, Universidad de Alcalá, Spain, jjcg@uah.es
María Teresa Villalba, Dep. of Computer Systems, universidad Europea de Madrid, Spain, maite.villalba@uem.es

Abstract: Teamwork ability is considered as one of the most important ‘soft skills’ for computing
students. Many educational proposals oriented to develop this skill can be found in literature.
However, a quantitative objective approach to measure teamwork performance is not usually found
in such works. TBA experience is a technique to reinforce the idea of teamwork benefits designed
to be applied to software engineering courses for computing students and professionals. This paper
summarizes the implementation of TBA, its benefits as well as results from application in different
groups of computing students and even professionals.

Introduction
‘Soft skills’ are considered as a key factor for success in computing labour market and are gaining increasing
importance in all areas of computing (while originally more appreciated in user support area) (Lee et al., 1995).
Different studies have highlighted the need of an adequate mix of technical competence and non technical skills for
certain IT positions (Wade & Parent, 2002) or in general (Seymour et al., 2006), when referred to certain locations
(Lee, 2006) or in general (Landry et al., 2000). The underlying reason is that, to help identify the most “adequate”
employees for professional positions (i.e., those who are most likely to contribute to organizational results),
organizations are tailoring their employee recruitment and selection criteria toward the assessment of interpersonal
and communication abilities as key factors once a minimum level of technical skills is achieved (Sullivan, 1995)..
Moreover, even students are in favour of soft skills as a basic requirement for computing professionals: e.g. (Chinn,
&VanDeGrift, 2008) reflects the importance of non technical skills for students when they adopt the role of people
in charge of hiring computing professionals: 88% and 84% for project managers and software developers. Even
more, as it is shown in (Lewis et al., 2008), soft skills are essential for retention in computing educational programs
so they should be explicitly included within the curriculum.
As a confirmation of this trend, RENTIC series of reports (www.cc.uah.es/lufesa) developed by one of the authors
offers an analysis of job requirements in Spain based on a sample of 2997 IT job ads: data reveal that 71,17% of
them require some kind of personal competence or skill: teamwork ability leads the ranking with presence in
10,44% of the total (a 14,67% of the ones which require any type of competence) what is consistent with similar
studies (Rosca, 2003). Of course, importance of teamwork in engineering education has been highlighted in many
contributions including references to ABET guidelines (Perusich et al., 2007) or how to cope with them (Lingard &
Berry, 2002). This need has been specifically remarked in the case of IT education with references to the opinion of
outstanding IT experts (Duley et al., 2001) and it is recognized as a key factor along with other social issues in the
specific field of software requirements analysis Goguen, I (1994). In fact, in the case of software engineering
courses within IT degrees, other important skills should be promoted to address specific job profile needs related to
positions like software/systems analyst, functional analyst, software engineer, etc. Orientation to customer needs or
analysis ability (related to software requirements) are also in top places of requirements for these positions.
In general, educators feel it is not easy to communicate and promote correct attitude in students to face tasks as
requirements analysis within a realistic situation where incomplete information, fuzzy expectations of customers and
social interaction (among others) are key factors which should be managed. Of course, first step is to get students to
be aware of these factors as well as the importance of being oriented to customers needs (the main goal in software
projects) and being concerned about real benefits of teamwork. In fact, students are also quite reluctant to teamwork
experiences. Sometimes group projects or assignments breed terror in many students'hearts. "Anything but group
projects," they beg. "I'll work extra hard and do it myself but please don' t make me have to work in a team."
In this article, an experience intended to enhance awareness of teamwork benefits while students develop specific
software engineering abilities is presented. One of the specific advantages of this experience, as can be seen below
in the presentation of data, is the quantification of teamwork benefits in terms of results for a specific activity of

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 Total Difficult % TC Dif Team vs % team TC % indiv. % team
Type Total People quest quest % TC/total %TCR %TWR team Indiv TC >=indiv. TC difficult difficult
Pilot Spain UEMISG205 35 35 61,18% 69,35% 8,17% 88,24%
Spain UEMIIS07 9 26 10 35,47% 30,34% 5,13% 46,15% 10,68% 88,89% 21,11% 20,0%
Spain UEMISG207 10 26 10 31,54% 26,15% 5,38% 39,74% 8,21% 90,00% 19,00% 23,3%
Spain UEMIIS06 14 26 10 40,11% 34,34% 4,81% 46,15% 6,04% 85,71% 40,71% 38,3%
Spain UC3M08-1 16 12 3 27,08% 16,67% 10,42% 33,33% 6,25% 75,00% 12,50% 6,7%
Spain UC3M08-2 25 12 3 31,67% 22,33% 9,33% 30,21% -1,46% 44,00% 22,67% 20,8%
Spain Freshmen CEURA 09 19 26 10 34,21% 25,71% 10,12% 40,77% 6,56% 100,00% 31,05% 42,0%
Multinational Denmark07 27 17 1 40,05% 31,45% 8,73% 53,68% 13,63% 85,19% 3,85% 14,3%
Multinational UEM08 26 26 10 42,46% 31,52% 11,54% 56,92% 14,47% 92,31% 30,38% 16,0%
IT professionals ATICA09 8 26 10 49,04% 40,38% 8,65% 51,92% 2,88% 62,50% 38,75% 35,0%
IT professionals SIMO08 27 12 3 27,16% 19,75% 8,02% 38,89% 11,73% 85,19% 13,58% 13,3%
Table 1: results in TBA experience for several groups of students and professionals

Examining detailed results (not listed for space reasons) in multinational environments do not reveal significant
differences of performance depending on the country or the university. In the case of gender (Table 2) available data
are restricted to three experiences (one from multinational groups, one from professionals and one from students)
where distribution was 9 female and 44 male students. Again there are not significant differences in performance
due to gender, although small size of sample recommends further study with new experiences.

Total Difficult % TC Dif Team vs % team TC % indiv. % team

Global People quest quest % TC/total %TCR %TWR team Indiv TC >=indiv. TC difficult difficult
Male 44 26 10 40,82% 31,47% 10,47% 49,36% 8,54% 88,64% 31,90% 30,0%
Female 9 26 10 38,89% 31,62% 9,40% 49,36% 10,47% 100,00% 30,00% 30,0%
Table 2: comparative results for male and female participants

Finally, the opinion of participants has been recorded using the pre and post set of questions mentioned in section 2.
In general, participants tend to perceive teamwork offers better results than individual effort although there is a big
variability (from 0% of change of opinion to 52.4%): results are worse in the case of the experience in Denmark
(where the exercise was shorter due to time and planning constraints). Even there was one student who
communicated a worse perception than his own before the experience. When dealing with the objective of
perceiving more clearly the task of software requirements analysis and the necessary orientation to customer needs,
results are really clear (three groups with 100% and the fourth one slightly over 80%) again with the exception of
the session at Copenhagen (although around half of the group were positive in both aspects). In the case of
professionals, some different questions were included with the following results:
• 61.9% think this experience has helped them to consolidate the idea of benefits of teamwork: 76.2% think a
TBA session would help professionals to be more conscious of teamwork benefits.
• When referred to additional benefits, 85.7% believe this experience can help professionals to be more oriented
to customer needs while 14.3% think its influence would be decisive. 90.5% also think this sessions reflects in a
exact manner part of the problems which arise during requirements elicitation and analysis so 85.7% believe it
would be useful in training programs for software analysts while 9.5% think it would be essential (only one
discarded value of the technique for this educational purpose).

Conclusions
Soft skills are recognized as important items in the education of computing graduates. Different studies in the related
literature have observed the importance of these skills for education and for labour market. Teamwork ability leads
the rank. Having in mind these results, we have analyzed the behaviour of a varied sample of students and even
computing professionals during an intensive session named TBA, designed to quantitatively measure teamwork
results when working to analyze a software requirements analysis case study. Results have confirmed that TBA
experience is effective to enhance perception of teamwork benefits in all type of computing students and even
professionals, without clear differences of gender or nationality. It is confirmed that teams get better results than
individuals in a high percentage of cases (above 80%). It is also confirmed that teamwork does not enable the
improvement of intuition when dealing with questions which can not be solved by logical analysis of information.
With the support of a web-based system (presented in section3), analysis of data and opinions collected during TBA
experiences will be more efficient and effective. This will help in the application of TBA experiences to more
groups of professionals as well as to multinational groups of students. We hope this larger sample would enable us
to get more precise observations on the influence of gender, nationality and experience on teamwork results.

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Immediate results of individual and team evaluation of results are possible are possible thanks to this system (fig. 3):
unique database helps to manage more efficiently data for trend analysis as well as research especially if compared
with the process of merging of information from several Excel sheets or the need of entering data from paper forms.

Figure 3: Results view

Application of TBA: results and benefits

First application of a TBA session was a pilot experience with a group of an IT degree at Universidad Europea de
Madrid (UEM). It was based on an easy case description for the system and a questionnaire of 36 questions.
Evaluation was primary qualitative according to feedback of students: they were really interested in the experience
and impressed by the results. The unique quantitative control was done comparing the TC of each student with the
results of the team. As shown in Table 1 (id: UEMISG205), average individual TC of students was 61.18% of
correct answers and the average TC of teams was 69.35%: 88.24% of students got better results with the team than
individually. Teamwork benefits were evident for students.
After the success of this initial experience, TBA sessions were implemented in several groups of students at UEM
and two of a different Spanish university (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid: UC3M) as well as in different
multinational computing seminars (with participation of students and teachers from several countries like Denmark,
USA, Austria, Spain and Finland) and in two professional seminars in Spain. As seen in table 1, experiences were
applied to varied groups of participants (although always organized in teams of 3-4 members) as well as different
case studies (with different number of questions). In general, average percentages of TC, TCR and TWR are very
similar in the different groups with no difference between local and multinational: in fact, multinational teams
composed of selected students of the different universities have a slightly better performance than national ones. In
all cases, average team TC was higher than average TC of members (except in the case of one Spain group in
experience), with a difference around 10%, higher for multinational teams As a confirmation of teamwork benefits,
the amount of students who got better results with the team than individually is around 85-90%.
Looking at the results when we select only the hardest questions included in questionnaires (those ones for which
the information in the case description is not enough for getting the correct answer, at least following a logical
process of analysis), it is confirmed that teamwork is not a magic bullet to solve hard questions without the
necessary information, i.e., intuition is not enhanced by teamwork (right columns, Table 1): percentage of TC tend
to be higher for individuals. These questions were inserted to help students to be aware of a typical situation in the
activity of software requirements analysis where incomplete information is common and analyst should collect more
data or inquiry user representative to clarify fuzzy elements.

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and to analyze trends. The subsequent stage was the use of an Excel file (fig. 1), password protected to restrict data
input to selected cells as well as to enable view of results only when the teacher reveals to students the
corresponding password. With the use of basic programming and Excel formulae, results could be calculated
immediately: some disadvantages were the need of extracting and merging data from multiple files for post-
experience analysis by the teacher.

Figure 1: Excel sheet to support TBA experience data collection and analysis

Figure 2: Participant view of questionnaire

Finally, a web-based system was designed to support in a centralized and more-efficient way the whole process of
TBA experience from first individual phases to group phase, collecting opinion from pre and post experience
questionnaires. It was developed to be used in a typical LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) environment Given
the fact that only a web browser is needed and that a unique database stores the results of all groups and experiences,
the system has enabled a more efficient implementation of TBA. Of course, administration tasks like user
administration and allocation to groups, experiences management, etc. are also easily supported by the system
through an administration user and interface.

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software requirements analysis. Different experiences in related literature (Goguen,1994) (McKenna et al. 1998)
(Morel et al., 1998) use subjective perception of students (even with self-assessment instruments or evaluated by
observers Ghanem, A. & Roberts, S. (1999)) as main evaluation indicator of benefits and as performance measure
for teamwork. However, some experiences have revealed that a variety of methods should be used to evaluate
teamwork performance once a project or assignment is being developed (Sharp, 2002).

Description
The TBA (Teamwork Benefits Awareness) experience recreates a typical situation for software analysts where they
have to analyze a preliminary system description with incomplete information to determine real software
requirements expected by the user (or customer). This experience is the first step for a whole development project
where each team of students has to develop analysis and design models for the intended system with strict criteria of
success: real needs of the customer should be fulfilled as the main goal although technical correctness of models
(using software engineering methods) is also necessary. Teacher acts as customer representative to provide, in
subsequent steps, only the information really and adequately requested by students with tough constraints of
availability (i.e. teacher accepts dialogue, interviews or documents when his busy agenda allows it and only if they
respect social habits of professional interaction instead of usual teacher-student communication) and level of
effective help (i.e. restricted to answer questions on requirements details).
TBA experience is inspired on known techniques (Managerial Effectiveness Seminar) used by human resources
consultants to train professionals to increase productivity and efficiency through teamwork and effective leadership
(Reddin, 1986). TBA is programmed with this sequence of phases:
1. Students received a short (up to two pages) intentionally incomplete and not extremely organized)
description of the customer needs for a new software application with a short time to read it (10-15
minutes): no questions or communication with colleagues are allowed.
2. Each student individually (again no questions or communication are possible) answers a set of multi-choice
questions (e.g., 25-30) where correct answer may require marking 1 to n options (time: 20-25 minutes).
3. Each students records (either using a paper form or a specially designed Excel-sheet or using a web based
form) his/her list of answers as well as opinion on the following assertion: “Teamwork enables better
results than individual effort” choosing between “always”, “sometimes” or “never”.
4. After individual phase, teams (3-4 students) should discuss answers to create a common list of answers
through consensus. One of the members should act as secretary to record agreement (time: 20-25 minutes).
5. Once teacher has confirmed all the teams has finished and recorded their common team answers, he/she
reveals correct answers so it enables teams to calculate the number of correct answers both for each
member and for the whole team. In fact, three different numbers are computed for each member: total
number of correct answers (TC), number of correct answers adopted as global answers for the team (TCR:
talent contribution rate) and number of correct answers not accepted by the team for the common proposal
of answers (TWR: talent waste rate). A short session of discussion of the results where all the teams and the
teacher participate is hold once all the data are available. Teacher tends to highlight comparison of
individual score with global team’s one as well as the meaning of contribution rate and waste rate as
indicators of effectiveness and weaknesses of teamwork.
6. As a final step, students are encouraged to answer four additional questions to check opinion of each team
member on the experience. These questions address the following items:
a. Teamwork enables better results than individual effort
b. Now I have reached better understanding of real work of software analysts (yes/no).
c. I am more conscious of what means customer orientation in requirements analysis (yes/no)
Although TBA could be run using only paper forms and pencils, computerized support is essential to enable a
deeper and faster analysis of results as well as the generation of statistics for educational analysis and research.
Section 3 describes the supporting system of the TBA experience.

Supporting system
Originally, TBA experience was organized using paper forms to collect data. The problem was the effort and time
required to evaluate answers as well as the difficulty of transferring results to computer tools to generate statistics

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