Observations and Summary
In order to monitor the interaction and behavior of the students throughout the project the instructor attended some of the outside the classroom meetings between the two groups. In addition, students were encourage to use email as the preferred way of communication between the two group, and they were also required to include the instructor on all email communications. A number of interesting observations were made as a result of this experience. The
most interesting observation was related to the difference between the interaction of the two groups (development and SQA) during the build one and build two. Overall, during build one, the SQA team was viewed more as a partner, where both, development and SQA, groups are doing their best to reach a common goal, “getting the product out of the door.” On the other hand, during the build two, in most cases, students no longer recognized the “common goal”, During this build, the development team had the same goal, “getting the product out of the door”, however, the students in the graduate course goal was “to make sure that, there is no defect left in the product before it gets out of the door.” In most cases, there was an additional level of tension between the groups during the build two than build one. In one extreme case, the SQA team was viewed as an enemy, and it got to the point that the instructor has to intervene, and make sure students left their ego outside of the class. This was not a very surprising observation, since the same phenomenon is true in some cases in the industry. Another observation was related to the feasibility of incorporating the V model development lifecyc1e in the undergraduate project. What became obvious was the fact the in general, undergraduate curriculum does not pay appropriate attention to the issues associated with the quality of the product. In general, the undergraduate computer science curriculum does not require students to take courses associated with testing and quality assurance. As a result, students have a hard time understanding the roles and responsibilities of the SQA function, therefore, once they are faced with the existence of an SQA function, they may view them as “quality cops” or even worst “spies”.