Bad blood: Managing toxic relationships through belbin roles for first year software engineering students

The approach by most universities in pitching team-based projects at senior undergraduate level as a learning and assessment tool can be considerably risky for student success, especially if a student discovers only in their final year of study, that they overestimated the command of their soft skills, potentially leading to them failing the project. This paper reports on an initiative aimed at minimizing this risk by introducing the concept of teamwork earlier in the curriculum, particularly, at first-year level, rather than allowing senior students to be blindsided at the later and (far more) crucial stage. This approach is meant to encourage students to explore interactions with one another, identifying potential shortcomings, and encountering likely sources that often give rise to conflict in team environments. Being the “Rainbow Nation”, South Africa can be particularly susceptible to disagreements borne from social differences. Because we are working with first-year students, and because they are typically busy learning to transition from high school to university, the team exercise had to be designed and implemented in such a way as to ensure that opportunities arose, enabling students to question themselves. In addition to having to develop a software solution of their choice, students were introduced to the concept of Belbin roles to better understand how different personalities positively contribute to software development teams and encouraged to assess their own personalities in this regard. Finally, we asked them to write a reflective essay in which they describe their experiences of working in a team. In some essays, reasons for challenges arising were quite detailed while many identified specific soft skills that would need attention to ensure better success on projects in the future. This was in stark contrast to an initial consensus that the students would be able to work in teams without issue.