Unfair work distribution is common in project-based learning with teams of students. One contributing factor is that students are differently skilled developers. To mitigate the differences in a course with group work, we introduced mandatory programming lab sessions. The intervention did not affect the work distribution, showing that more is needed to balance the workload. Contrary to our goal, the intervention was very well received among experienced students, but unpopular with students weak at programming.

Dr. Markus Borg is a senior researcher with RISE Research Institutes of Sweden AB and an adjunct lecturer at Lund University.

The goal of my research is to support the successful engineering of software-intensive systems. My main contributions deal with tapping into the collected wisdom of historical project data to facilitate machine learning for actionable decision support in defect management, for example bug assignment and change impact analysis. Currently, I’m in a transition from “machine learning for software engineering” to “software engineering for machine learning” – I want to evolve software engineering practices to match the needs when developing the data-driven systems of the future.