Peer evaluation in software engineering team project courses: A taxonomy and guidelines for educators

Peer evaluation is widely used in team project courses in software engineering to assess individual contributions, promote accountability, and improve teamwork. Existing peer evaluation practices vary greatly in their purpose, design, and implementation, making it difficult to compare them and to establish best practices. This study systematically investigates peer evaluation in team project courses in software engineering. It introduces a taxonomy to categorize peer evaluation practices based on their purpose, participants, mechanisms, and outcomes. Using this taxonomy, we organize findings from existing literature and characterize how peer evaluation is applied across different courses. We further examine educators’ perspectives on the quality and applicability of the taxonomy. Based on the educators' feedback, we updated the taxonomy and provided a set of guidelines to support educators and researchers in designing and implementing peer evaluation interventions and reporting them in a structured and informed way.