TDDD83 Automatic translation; Swedish version is authoritative

Experience summary

In addition to the bachelor's report, each student shall also submit an individual experience summary, which is an academic essay in which you reflect on a course experience such as a project. Reflecting means that you critically examine your experience and explicitly formulate what you have learned.

 

Why do you write an experience summary?

There are many benefits to reflecting and writing an experience summary. When you reflect and write an experience summary you get the opportunity to process the course experience and think about how it has helped your learning. Without reflecting on the course experience, what you have learned can be forgotten or its learning potential lost. Reflective writing requires you to connect your experience to the course content, which leads to you practising your analytical skills. Through the reflection document you demonstrate the extent to which the experience has helped you achieve the course's learning objectives.

 

How do you write an experience summary?

• The individual experience summary shall be 3–5 A4 pages (1500–2500 words)
• The experience summary is read by your supervisor and shall be written in English in cases where your supervisor cannot read Swedish (some of them know Swedish well enough for the experience summary but not for the report).
• Each student shall focus on their own experiences from the project work regarding both process-related and technical experiences and reflect on them, for example: 
  • If you divided up the work between you during the project work, you can for example address experiences relating to the areas you focused more on: e.g. the scrum master role or experiences from Ajax or Python. 
  • Reflect on how individual skills have developed during the work and address both technical and process-related experiences. 
  • Reflect on the execution of the project from your perspective. The individual goals you set for yourself at the start of the work — did you achieve them or not? Why? 

• Gibbs' reflective model shall be used when analysing a specific situation or event regarding both process-related and technical experiences. Gibbs' reflective model consists of six steps and your analysis is expected to address all steps in continuous prose:

  1. Description	The first step is to briefly describe the situation, event or experience without making judgements, interpretations or attempting to draw conclusions. For process-related experiences: What happened? Who was involved? In what context did it occur? What did those involved do? How did you act? For technical experiences: What happened? What technologies were involved? In what context did it occur? (Git/version control are process-related experiences)
  2. Feelings, thoughts and reactions	The second step involves bringing clarity without analysing. For process-related experiences: concretely formulate thoughts, feelings and reactions regarding what is described in step 1. What do you think the others involved felt and thought? For technical experiences: concretely formulate the consequence of the event for the project. Again without analysing these yet.
  3. Evaluation	The third step helps to understand feelings, thoughts and reactions with questions: - What was good and what was bad about the experience? - What was positive/negative? Evaluate.
  4. Analysis	How can you understand the situation, event or experience? Draw on thoughts and ideas from external sources. For process-related experiences: What actually happened? Were different people's experiences the same or different in any significant way? If things went well or badly, how did you and the others contribute to this? Which learning objectives relate to the situation, event or experience? How does this experience improve your understanding of the course material? Does it reinforce or challenge your prior understanding? A constructively critical perspective shall be applied here. Here you may draw on relevant scientific sources. For technical experiences: In what way can positive experiences be applied in future projects? In what way could negative experiences have been avoided and how should things be done differently? Which learning objectives relate to the situation, event or experience? How does this experience improve your understanding of the course material? Does it reinforce or challenge your prior understanding? A constructively critical perspective shall be applied here. Here you may draw on relevant scientific sources.
  5. General conclusions	Here you shall formulate your learning: What did you learn? Explain how your reflection on the experience has led to improved understanding. How did you learn it? What can be taken away, in general, from these experiences and the analysis you have done? Why does this learning matter? Think about how your learning has helped you achieve a relevant learning objective. Here you may support your conclusions with related scientific publications.
  6. Personal action plans	How can you use what you have learned in the future? What will you do differently in this kind of situation in the future? What possible actions will you take as a result of what you have learned, both process-wise and technically? For example, what other technologies, approaches or solutions can you use?

  The model is taken from Gibbs G (1988) Learning by doing: a guide to teaching and learning methods. Cheltenham: The Geography Discipline Network.

• The reflection is supported by at least two relevant scientific articles published at a conference and/or in a journal, and doctoral theses.
• No course evaluation shall be included here, such as "The course worked well and the lab assignments gave a good start to learning Flask and JS." Such comments can be raised in connection with the course evaluation and are not something to be included in the experience summary.  

 

Tips

• Write a diary during the project and use it both as a tool for tracking the project and when you write up your experiences.
• The technical experience shall describe insights that others could benefit from (i.e. there shall be objective value in the insight), and you shall use a scientific reference to support and raise the quality and level of the insight described. To illustrate:
  Poor insights: “I have learned the important difference between UX design and GUI design.” or "I have learned Scrum, Flask, JavaScript" or "I was not familiar with the concept of Scrum and agile methods before the start of the project, but thought it would be interesting to try the concept. When I read about the methodology it felt appropriate to apply to a project of the kind we were about to do."
  Good insight: “Our initial difficulties in maintaining a buildable codebase in the project have shown how important continuous integration is (Fowler, xx). In practice this means that each developer …”.

 

Submission of individual experience summary

• The individual experience summary is submitted in Lisam under Submissions/Individual experience summary.
• The file shall be saved in PDF format. 

Page responsible: Martin Sjoelund
Last updated: 2026-02-27