Teaching collaborative software development: A case study

Software development is today done in teams of software developers who may be distributed all over the world. Software development has also become to contain more social aspects and the need for collaboration has become more evident. The importance of teaching development methods used in collaborative development is of importance, as skills beyond traditional software development are needed in this modern setting. A novel, student centric approach was tried out at Tampere University of Technology where a new environment called KommGame was introduced. This environment includes a reputation system to support the social aspect of the environment and thus supporting the learners collaboration with each other. In this paper, we present the KommGame environment and how it was applied on a course for practical results.