"Is My Mic On?" Preparing SE Students for Collaborative Remote Work and Hybrid Team Communication
It addresses the challenge for software engineering students in adapting to remote collaboration, but it is incremental as it focuses on applying existing industry tools in education.
This paper tackles the problem of preparing software engineering students for remote work by studying industry communication software, aiming to bridge the gap between academic practices and professional needs, though no specific results or numbers are provided.
Communication is essential for the success of student and professional software engineering (SE) team development projects. The projects delivered by SE courses provide valuable learning experiences for students because they teach industry-required skills such as teamwork, communication, and scheduling. Professional SE teams have adopted communication software such as Slack, Miro, Microsoft Teams, and GitHub Discussions to share files and convey information between team members. Likewise, they have distributed software development tools such as Visual Studio CodeSpaces and Jira to support productivity. In contrast, within academia, students have focused on having face-to-face meetings for team communication and communication tools for file sharing. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, universities have been forced to switch to an online or hybrid modality abruptly, thus compelling SE students to quickly adopt communication software. This paper proposes a study on the use of communication software in industry to prepare students for remote software development positions after graduation.