The objective of the JRefleX project is to develop a set of plugins for supporting developers, working individually or in small teams, to monitor and reflect upon their process and the code they develop. The specific context is that of supporting student teams in undergraduate project-based software-engineering courses, and enabling instructors to monitor team collaboration, to evaluate work products and to provide more salient advice to the teams.

Reflection has been demonstrated to be among the most powerful methods in support of learning. More generally, in the context of software development, several process-improvement models, such as SEI's PSP and TSP for example, adopt reflective monitoring as a means of improving the performance of individual (and teams of) software developers. Furthermore, reflection on software, i.e., mapping the developers' mental model to the structure of existing software assets, has been shown to an effective method of software understanding.

In JRefleX, the focus is on the analysis of two dimensions of software development:

• The collaboration process, i.e., the negotiation and distribution of tasks, among the developers in the team
• The evolution of the produced work products, i.e., design and code, through the project lifecycle.