Interpersonal process recall: a novel approach to illuminating students’ software development processes

ABSTRACTBackground and Context: Encouraging undergraduate programming students to think more about their software development processes is challenging. Most programming courses focus on coding skill development and mastering programming language features; subsequently software development processes (e.g. planning, code commenting, and error debugging) are undervalued. Moreover, many of these processes involve tacit thinking that is often seemingly invisible, meaning it can be difficult for teachers to identify and address shortcomings in student processes.Objective: In this paper, we employ a novel approach called Interpersonal Process Recall (IPR) to encourage students to think more about their software development processes.Method: We conducted IPR sessions with five undergraduate programming students—we screen captured them working on programming assignments, and then used the screen captures to stimulate reflection. IPR is hallmarked by several key features, namely its developmental (rather than evalu...