Pair programming -- two programmers working side-by-side at one computer collaborating on the same design, algorithm, code or test -- has been practiced in industry with great success for years. Higher quality products are produced faster. Yet, most who have not tried and tested pairprogramming reject the idea immediately as an overtly redundant, wasteful use of programming resources. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate through anecdotal, qualitative and quantitative evidence, that incorporating pair-programming into a software development process will help yield software products of better quality in less time with happier, more confident programmers. Supportive evidence comes from professional programmers and from the results of a structured experiment run with advanced undergraduate students at the University of Utah.

This paper is based on the premises that the purpose of engineering education is to graduate engineers who can design, and that design thinking is complex. The paper begins by briefly reviewing the history and role of design in the engineering curriculum. Several dimensions of design thinking are then detailed, explaining why design is hard to learn and harder still to teach, and outlining the research available on how well design thinking skills are learned. The currently most-favored pedagogical model for teaching design, project-based learning (PBL), is explored next, along with available assessment data on its success. Two contexts for PBL are emphasized: first-year cornerstone courses and globally dispersed PBL courses. Finally, the paper lists some of the open research questions that must be answered to identify the best pedagogical practices of improving design learning, after which it closes by making recommendations for research aimed at enhancing design learning.

SUMMARY—Teams of people working together for a common purpose have been a centerpiece of human social organization ever since our ancient ancestors first banded together to hunt game, raise families, and defend their communities. Human history is largely a story of people working together in groups to explore, achieve, and conquer. Yet, the modern concept of work in large organizations that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is largely a tale of work as a collection of individual jobs. A variety of global forces unfolding over the last two decades, however, has pushed organizations worldwide to restructure work around teams, to enable more rapid, flexible, and adaptive responses to the unexpected. This shift in the structure of work has made team effectiveness a salient organizational concern. Teams touch our lives everyday and their effectiveness is important to well-being across a wide range of societal functions. There is over 50 years of psychological research—literally thousands of studies—focused on understanding and influencing the processes that underlie team effectiveness. Our goal in this monograph is to sift through this voluminous literature to identify what we know, what we think we know, and what we need to know to improve the effectiveness of work groups and teams. We begin by defining team effectiveness and establishing the conceptual underpinnings of our approach to understanding it. We then turn to our review, which concentrates primarily on topics that have well-developed theoretical and empirical foundations, to ensure that our conclusions and recommendations are on firm footing. Our review begins by focusing on cognitive, motivational/affective, and behavioral team processes—processes that enable team members to combine their resources to resolve task demands and, in so doing, be effective. We then turn our attention to identifying interventions, or ‘‘levers,’ ’ that can shape or align team processes and thereby provide tools

The premise of this research is that the engineering design process is partially driven by achieving consensus and reconciling points of view among team members. Characterizing the quality of the design performance by measuring the coherence of the description of related design concepts and events in design documentation is examined. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) was used to analyze design documentation written by self-managing, cross-functional engineering design teams. Computational measurements of document variance and textual coherence were applied to the teams ’ design documents, presentation materials and e-mail communication. The levels of semantic coherence were correlated to assessments by faculty and product designers and engineers from industry of the design teams ’ process and outcome quality. The results indicated a statistically significant positive correlation between design document coherence and design performance, especially for poorly performing teams. The impact of this research is to provide team managers (people who create teams and manage teams) or self-organizing teams (teams that focus on self-reflection and peer evaluation) computational tools that could be integrated with design information management technologies to assist them in the management of engineering design teams.

The thesis is a collection of five papers that approach networking from the perspective of “the New Informatics.” Networking is a kind of working practice that typically is concerned with knowledge or service work, carried out by empowered employees who are engaged in highly co-operative efforts, and who rely extensively on the use of information technology (IT). “The New Informatics ” is an artificial science that explores the possibilities for inventing new ways of using IT with the objective to produce elaborated ideas that seem likely to be applicable in several situations. The overall research question asked in the thesis is: What are the possibilities to improve existing and invent new ideas of CSCW technology use in networking? The research question is approached from an individual and a group perspective. These perspectives are investigated in two empirical studies exploring the work in a dispersed and mobile IT support

Among researchers in multi-agent systems there has been growing interest in using intelligent agents to model and simulate human teamwork behaviors. Teamwork modeling is important for training humans in gaining collaborative skills, for supporting humans in making critical decisions by proactively gathering, fusing, and sharing information, and for building coherent teams with both humans and agents working effectively on intelligence-intensive problems. Teamwork modeling is also challenging because the research has spanned diverse disciplines from business management to cognitive science, human discourse, and distributed artificial intelligence. This article presents an extensive, but not exhaustive, list of work in the field, where the taxonomy is organized along two main dimensions: team social structure and social behaviors. Along the dimension of social structure, we consider agent-only teams and mixed human/agent teams. Along the dimension of social behaviors, we consider collaborative behaviors, communicative behaviors, helping behaviors, and the underpinning of effective teamwork--- shared mental models. The contribution of this article is that it presents an organizational framework for analyzing a variety of teamwork simulation systems and for further studying simulated teamwork behaviors.

Abstract: The introduction of new communication technologies such as the World Wide Web are creating unique opportunities for AEC project teams to develop new coordination and communication strategies. Of particular interest is the capability of teams to interact remotely in a virtual team environment. However, this evolution of project team interactions is introducing a diverse range of new issues in project management and process control which requires a new generation of management frameworks. This paper introduces the requirements of these management frameworks as developed through studies of interdisciplinary, virtual project teams working together over the World Wide Web.

Creativity is increasingly important in today’s fast changing world. The use of Group Support Systems has been shown to improve the quantity and quality of ideas produced by groups during idea generation. Similarly, creative techniques may be used to increase creativity. Therefore, the use of creative techniques together with a GSS may help groups think more creatively. Brainstorming is the most used and studied of the techniques. However, to further increase creativity, other types of creative techniques may be used. This paper presents a theory addressing structural aspects of both creative techniques and GSS, including testable hypotheses. A laboratory experiment is described that tests these hypotheses for three creative techniques (Brainstorming, Assumption Reversals and Analogies) implemented using a GSS. Results support the proposed theory. Analogies produced fewer but more creative ideas. Assumption Reversals produced the most ideas, but these ideas were less creative than ideas produced by Analogies and Brainstorming.

Workload issue in computer science project courses are addressed in this paper. We briefly discuss why high workloads occur in project courses and the reasons they are a problem. We then describe some course changes we made to reduce the workload in a software engineering project course, without compromising course quality. The techniques include: adopting an iterative and incremental process, reducing the requirements for writing documents, and gathering accurate data on time spent on various activities. We conclude the paper by assessing the techinques, providing good evidence for a dramatic change in the workload, and an increase in student satisfaction levels. We provide some evidence, and an argument, that learning has not been affected by the changes.

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