A System for Supporting Group Exercise in Software Development with Facilities to Create an Optimal Plan of Student Grouping and Team Formation of Each Group

In the recent years, software development has become larger in scale and more complicated. Furthermore, development with faster delivery and lower cost is required, thus the software development environment is becoming more and more critical. Therefore, companies are seeking high potential students in universities who have a practical sense. The information science and engineering department of Shibaura Institute of Technology provides group exercise classes that adopt a more practical approach to software development such that students can obtain the knowledge and skills necessary for software development (strictly it is a team exercise in the sense that each member of the group shares the tasks for software development). However, as the class hours assigned for learning software engineering are not sufficient, EtUDE (Environment for Ultimate software Development Exercise), the support system that learners can collectively practice at any time anywhere was developed, and introduced to the exercise classes. However, as the skills of software development differ from one student to another, the problem that some teams are not able to accomplish the assignment by the deadline often occurs. Therefore, the authors developed EtUDE/GO, which automatically generates the best plan for team formation. Optimizing team fori-nation with this system, we can solve the problem attributable to difference in students' software development skills. This paper discusses the system overview of EtUDE/GO as well as the consequence of applying the system.