Learning to Work From Home: How Novice and Experienced Software Professionals Compare Online and In-person Collaboration

Industry-sponsored capstone experiences that involve developing software solutions create valuable opportunities for students to engage in teamwork and learn important career skills just prior to joining the software workforce. The collaboration and communication in capstone projects, which typically happen in person, were forced to move online during the COVID-19 pandemic. We leveraged the transition to conduct a two-stage mixed-methods study that compared the in-person and online capstone experiences of students (novice software developers) and project sponsors (experienced industry professionals) to understand how novices engage in online collaboration. We uncovered that novices find online collaboration more challenging compared to experienced professionals. The challenges faced by the novices and the misalignment with experienced professionals point to a number of avenues for training novice software professionals on effective engagement in geographically distributed collaboration, which is increasingly the norm in the software industry.