Extensive research confirms the benefits of group work in various educational and business domains. There has, however, been little consideration to rigorous formation of groups, especially project teams, in software engineering disciplines to improve the outcomes of these groups. Previous studies show that the outcome of groups will be affected by a number of different factors, such as the context in which these groups interact, the characteristics and the behaviour of each individual and the group composition. This research evaluates the extent to which it is possible to enhance the group outcomes by systematically reconstructing the groups of students and hence improve the performances and raise the overall outcome level of a software engineering lecture at two universities, the Alpen-Adria University of Klagenfurt and the Technical University of Kosice. An empirical experiment has been carried out involving 69 groups and 140 individuals. The results of this experiment were then compared with historical data of 961 groups (approximately 2,400 students) on group outcomes over a period of 12 years. The findings show statistically significant improvements of the outcomes for those groups that were systematically constructed. These results could enable business leaders and educators to systematically form their groups for improving the outcomes of these groups.

Online laboratories have gained motion during the last decade, mainly due to the increase of online education programs. Online labs provide pedagogical values in some circumstances and fill in some gaps left open by traditional hands-on experiments. It is however a challenge to develop and deploy such laboratories for lecturing staff, as special software development skills are needed for such a task. In this research, we propose a novel approach for the deployment of new experimentation equipment. This system is not tailored to any specific type of laboratory. It can rather be understood as general purpose service, or lab as a service (LaaS). It is different from the approaches to deliver lab as a service implemented to date because the intended consumers of our service are lab owners, and not lab users (students, teachers and lab instructors). It shifts the complexity of a lab server to a central location (cloud) and ensures that the consumer (lab owner) has only to implement a tiny piece of software to deploy an online laboratory.