An Unexpected Result
March 28, 2008 – 12:23 pmThis term, the students in my third-year software engineering course have been working in teams to build a shared to-do list plugin for Facebook. Each of the six teams has worked independently (well, as independently as students ever work) for the first three exercises. For the fourth, each team conducted a review of every other team’s code to decide which one they would continue with for the final exercise. They had to switch: teams were not allowed to continue with their own code.
Dave Wortman has been doing this “review and buy” exercise for a couple of decades. This time, the result is almost a perfect permutation:
- Cereal and Pancakes have bought Waffles.
- Eggs has bought Fruitbar.
- Fruitbar has bought Cereal.
- Porridge has bought Eggs.
- Waffles has bought Pancakes.
I was surprised, as I’d been expecting there to be a clear winner. I’ll be reviewing (and grading) the reviews over the next few days; it’ll be interesting to see whether groups got different answers because they’re using different criteria, or because… um… hm, I don’t have another hypothesis just yet.
One Response to “An Unexpected Result”
Hmmm,
That is very interesting.
Were there any rewards associated with being a winner?
When I was in Dave Wortman’s class we had to go through the same exercise. While thinking about who to pick a thought crossed my mind: it would be more beneficial to my group [mark wise] to pick a team that will pick us in return.
We ended up picking a team that had most test coverage.
But like you said, a surprising result.
By Max on Mar 29, 2008