  Collaboration skills are important for future software engineers. In computer
science education, these skills are often practiced through group assignments,
where students develop software collaboratively. The approach that students
take in these assignments varies widely, but often involves a division of
labour. It can then be argued whether collaboration still takes place. The
discipline of computing education is especially interesting in this context,
because some of its specific features (such as the variation in entry skill
level and the use of source code repositories as collaboration platforms) are
likely to influence the approach taken within groupwork. The aim of this
research is to gain insight into the work division and allocation strategies
applied by computer science students during group assignments. To this end, we
interviewed twenty students of four universities. The thematic analysis shows
that students tend to divide up the workload to enable working independently,
with pair programming and code reviews being often employed. Motivated
primarily by grade and efficiency factors, students choose and allocate tasks
primarily based on their prior expertise and preferences. Based on our
findings, we argue that the setup of group assignments can limit student
motivation for practicing new software engineering skills, and that
interventions are needed towards encouraging experimentation and learning.
