Group work support for the BlueJ IDE

Learning to work in teams is essential for every software professional. Developing software as a team project is the standard practice in industry, and should be practiced in university courses. Starting effective group work practices early can lead to better acceptance of group work as a standard development mode.

Nonetheless, group work is often not included in introductory programming courses. The reason is often the necessary overhead associated with developing software in groups. We present a design and implementation of group work support tools integrated into the educational BlueJ IDE, which remove much of the tool overhead and make it easier to include group work in introductory courses.