Configuring an appropriate team environment to satisfy relevant criteria

Accredited computer science programs have a capstone course requiring a significant programming project. Generally, these projects are part of a software engineering class and require a team effort. To facilitate team interaction, instructor monitoring, and objective performance assessment, an appropriate team environment, or set of components and services that can be combined to form an environment, must be chosen, configured, and managed. Since many of the popular team environments have subscription or per-seat licensing, educational institutions could pay significant costs to keep pace with industry. However, instructors should be able to provide a work environment with modern tools to facilitate team interaction and foster productivity while at the same time minimizing cost and reducing their configuration and management effort. In this paper, we survey a wide range of team environments and individual services for team interaction. We compare and contrast them against a set of general, user, and instructor criteria, highlighting features that are relevant to a software engineering team in an educational setting. In addition to the survey, we discuss an open source, experimental platform we are developing to allow instructors to incorporate free services and create a collaborative team environment based on the criteria they want to target.