The impact of undergraduate mentorship on student satisfaction and engagement, teamwork performance, and team dysfunction in a software engineering group project

Mentorship schemes in software engineering education usually involve professional software engineers guiding and advising teams of undergraduate students working collaboratively to develop a software system. With or without mentorship, teams run the risk of experiencing team dysfunction: a situation where lack of engagement, internal conflicts, and/or poor team management lead to different assessment outcomes for individual team members and overall frustration and dissatisfaction within the team. The paper describes a mentorship scheme devised as part of a 33 week software engineering group project course, where the mentors were undergraduate students who had recently completed the course successfully and possessed at least a year’s experience as professional software engineers. We measure and discuss the impact the scheme had on: (1) student satisfaction and engagement, (2) team performance, and (3) team dysfunction.