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Team Composition in Software Engineering Project Courses

Composing well-balanced, effective development teams for software engineering project courses is important for facilitating learning, fostering student motivation as well as obtaining a successful project outcome. However, team composition is a challenging task for instructors because they have to consider a variety of possibly conflicting criteria such as practical constraints, skill distribution, or project motivation. In this paper, we describe our process for composing development teams based on a pre-defined set of criteria that we have established from our experience conducting project courses since 2008 and constantly refined since. We reflect on these criteria by analyzing the team synergy and project satisfaction of participating students as well as their perspective on challenges in their teams in one concrete instance of a multi-project capstone course. Our findings show that lack of motivation, problems with interpersonal relationships and communication issues affect the less satisfied teams more than the others.