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Metacognition is widely acknowledged as a key soft skill in collaborative software development. The ability to plan, monitor, and reflect on cognitive and team processes is crucial to the efficient and effective functioning of a software team. To explore students' use of reflection--one aspect of metacognition--in undergraduate team software projects, we analyzed the online chat channels of teams participating in agile software development projects in two undergraduate courses that took place exclusively online (n = 23 teams, 117 students, and 4,915 chat messages). Teams' online chats were dominated by discussions of work completed and to be done; just two percent of all chat messages showed evidence of reflection. A follow-up analysis of chat vignettes centered around reflection messages (n = 63) indicates that three-fourths of the those messages were prompted by a course requirement; just 14\% arose organically within the context of teams' ongoing project work. Based on our findings, we identify opportunities for computing educators to increase, through pedagogical and technological interventions, teams' use of reflection in team software projects.
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This content will become publicly available on February 28, 2026
Improving Agile Retrospectives through Metacognitive Scaffolding
The retrospective is a crucial component of the agile software development process. In previous studies of retrospectives in undergraduate team software development projects, students exhibited limited and shallow reflection. We speculate that this is due to students' limited experience with reflection and the absence of clear guidance for engaging in deep reflection during agile retrospectives. To explore the potential for a pedagogical intervention to foster deeper reflection in retrospectives, we present an empirical comparison of a standard retrospective model against an enhanced retrospective model that scaffolds deeper levels of reflection by prompting students to justify and critique their practices and weigh alternative approaches. Through a systematic classification of the reflection level of statements made during individual brainstorming and team discussion phases of retrospectives, our study found that the enhanced model led to individuals and teams engaging in significantly higher levels of reflection. Our findings contribute to improving software engineering education by demonstrating the efficacy of an enhanced pedagogical model for team retrospectives.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1915196
- PAR ID:
- 10555900
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
- Date Published:
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- team software projects software engineering software engineering education metacognition reflection content analysis agile
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- New York
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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