ARE COMPANY SOFTWARE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES SUITED FOR VOLUNTARY STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS? Cover Image

ARE COMPANY SOFTWARE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES SUITED FOR VOLUNTARY STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS?
ARE COMPANY SOFTWARE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES SUITED FOR VOLUNTARY STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS?

Author(s): Ioana Ionescu, Mădălina Boboc, Costin-Anton Boiangiu
Subject(s): Education, Higher Education , ICT Information and Communications Technologies, Sociology of Education
Published by: Carol I National Defence University Publishing House
Keywords: Software management; Voluntary student organizations; Tools; Students; Volunteering; Management methodologies;

Summary/Abstract: Developing software inside an organization can be a valuable experience for students in their early careers as software engineers. Delivering code written by more than one person means extra work on organizing, communicating, tracking progress, and assessing results. As skills like team management, leadership, teamwork, and communication are not taught as a main course in computer science or engineering universities, a good question to ask is how students learn to be effective? An adequate assumption would be that they see successful companies as models. If a corporation developing software projects uses a certain set of tools, schemes, and concepts to organize their work, then the same things should work for student projects as well. However, even if programs and strategies designed for good teamwork and management have the best intentions in mind, this assumption is not always true. This could result in a poor organization with limited performance. As such consequences are to be avoided, a study focusing on identifying good practices for students could establish the needs of voluntary student organizations in order to meet them without the unnecessary corporate overhead. To correctly assess student voluntary organization status, data describing several team management strategies have been collected both via forms and interviews. The following paper presents a research conducted on student voluntary organizations. This work identifies key tools and management practices that are commonly used by teams of students and how they compare to the tools used inside a company with paid employees. The final purpose is to identify good management practices inside student voluntary organizations that can be used as a reference by students when establishing new teams. The paper starts by analyzing each side’s motivation for working inside a company/organization, continues with setting key performance metrics for collecting data, and ends with a comparative discussion. This study’s contribution represents a series of recommendations of tools and approaches that suit student voluntary organizations the most.

  • Issue Year: 17/2021
  • Issue No: 02
  • Page Range: 11-19
  • Page Count: 9
  • Language: English