Project

In the 2021/2022 academic year, we launched the project "Deployment of a Learning Dashboard to Visualize and Monitor the Achievement of Learning Objectives in Courses Based on Team Development of Software Projects" in Software Engineering Project and Web Applications and Services, two compulsory subjects of the Software Engineering Specialization in the Bachelor Degree in Informatics Engineering of the Facultat d'Informàtica de Barcelona. The Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya partially funded this project as part of its 2021 Call for Educational Innovation Projects.

Since their inception, these two subjects have applied project-based learning through the execution of a software project, which the students carry out in organized teams. We intend that, through the use of the Learning Dashboard, the students and professors of these subjects could receive accurate feedback about the individual and team learning process and also make informed decisions about how to prioritize and plan their actions during the development of the software projects.

The Learning Dashboard has been designed and built as a natural evolution of the Q-Rapids Dashboard, a dashboard to monitor and assess software production in agile environments.

The Learning Dashboard collects and integrates data from various sources. In its current implementation, it retrieves data from Taiga (e.g., tasks, user stories, epics) and GitHub (e.g., commits, branches) of the projects being developed by the students. Still, it can be extended to include new types of data sources if needed.

From the data collected from these sources, the Learning Dashboard computes several metrics (e.g., ratio of commits per student, modified lines per student, tasks assigned and completed). It aggregates these metrics into factors (e.g., Commit Contribution, Task Contribution). These factors are then used to calculate Strategic Indicators (e.g., Backlog Management, Information Completeness) to provide a holistic overview of the status of development of the software project.

The Learning Dashboard presents all this information with an appealing and interactive graphical interface, showing the current status of the project, as well as its historical evolution. The Learning Dashboard also categorizes the values of strategic indicators, factors, and metrics (e.g., ‘excellent’, ‘good’, or ‘bad’) based on some predefined thresholds. These categories and thresholds can be customized by the teacher to easily assess the performance of the project.