In Software Engineering (SE) team project courses, students work in teams to develop a software solution for a customer. Besides technical, working in teams in such team project courses involve several non-technical challenges related to teamwork as well (such as unequal contributions, communication and coordination, team conflicts). Peer evaluation (PE) and team contracts (TC) are well known pedagogical interventions in project-based education, including software engineering (SE). We applied these two interventions in two SE team project courses at our university: a small-team project course (5–7 students per team) and a large-team project course (10–12 students per team, typically organized into subteams), to test if they help to address the teamwork challenges. The analysis of students and teachers’ reflections shows that they found team contracts as a useful intervention for early team building in both contexts but quickly lost relevance without structured follow-up. Peer evaluation was perceived as more effective in small teams, where students had more visibility into peers’ work, while its value was limited in large teams due to subteam structures and reduced visibility of individual contributions. We also share implications for teachers of SE team project courses on how to introduce peer evaluation and team contracts in such courses.

@inproceedings{paperbot11973,
  title = {Using Peer Evaluations and Team Contracts in Software Engineering Team Project Courses},
  author = {Nayla Nasir and Muhammad Usman and Usman Nasir},
  booktitle = {ICSE},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.1145/3786580.3786978}
}