What cognitive activities are performed in student projects?

Software processes are being increasingly taught to software engineering students. Previous studies have however shown that actual activities performed in the course of student projects differ widely from what students had been taught. This study defines a new cognitive activity classification scheme that has been used to record effort spent by six student teams producing parallel implementations of the same software requirements specification. Three of the teams used a process based on the UPEDU, a teaching-oriented process derived from the Rational Unified Process. The other three teams used a process built around the principles of the extreme programming (XP) methodology. Results show that coding-related activities dominate the effort distribution for all the teams. Also, variations in the relative emphasis put on each activity between processes are low and limited to a small number of activities. The study provides lessons that may be useful when evaluating the importance of specific software processes.