Using issue tracking tools to facilitate student learning of communication skills in software engineering courses

When teaching communication and teamwork skills in software engineering courses, it is often difficult to relate the theories of communication as presented in communication textbooks to actual student interactions and team activities because the majority of student interactions and team activities take place outside the classroom. Through our experience in teaching communication theories in CS456/556, a software engineering course at Ohio University, we observed that when communication theories are delivered in traditional methods such as lectures without additional exercises designed for students to apply the theories, many students tend to treat them as an independent part of the course and continue to guide their behaviors in team activities with their old habits and preexisting intuitions. We found that issue tracking tools can help facilitate student learning of communication skills by forcing students to explicitly carry out effective steps recommended by communication theories and thus improve communications among students. Moreover, issue tracking tools also improve communications between the students and the instructor, and enable the instructor to be more aware of team status, detect team problems early on, and reply less on time-consuming and often inaccurate in-class team status reports.