Using Process Mining to Understand Students’ and Teams’ Dynamics

In Software Engineering courses several team activities are proposed to improve not only students’ technical skills but also their capability to collaborate. However, the evaluation of the activity of each student relative to the whole team is very hard for the teacher. For this reason, several studies aim to investigate how to support teachers in the evaluation of the activities of students involved in software development teams. This study proposes an approach to extract information about software team members’ behavior by mining the data gathered by the interactions of students with the coding environment. The paper also describes an exploratory study consisting to use the proposed approach to analyze the activities of the students involved in a team project assigned at the computer programming II course held at the University of Bari Aldo Moro. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach to support the comprehension of students’ team dynamics and single student contribution along with the teamwork.