Power through brokering

Many software engineering projects use open source software tools or components. The project team's active participation in the open source community may be necessary for the team to use the technology. Based on an in-depth field study of industry software engineering project students interacting with an open source community, we find that participation in the community may affect the team's work and learning by strengthening the power of the broker between the team and the community. We outline pitfalls and benefits of having student teams acquire development-related knowledge from open source communities. The findings are relevant to the organization and supervision of software engineering student projects interacting with open source communities.

1. Introduction

Student SE industry projects, also known as customer-driven projects, are designed to provide SE students with realistic experience from software development work. The projects require that students relate to various stakeholders and engage in crosscommunity interaction [1]. Desired learning outcomes span both social and technical skills. The latter includes being flexible to customers' technology requirements, which may be outside the team's current experience and preference [2]. Through the pedagogical organization of SE project courses, student teams are provided with scaffolding for their learning process [3], [4], which might include guidance on the use of particular technology. Sometimes in the case of industry projects, neither course staff nor the customer is familiar with technology required in the project. The students have to demonstrate independence in coping with such situations.