CTGDSD 2011 – Proceedings

Teaching a Global Project Course: Experiences and Lessons Learned
Peter Gloor, Maria Paasivaara, Casper Lassenius, Detlef Schoder, Kai Fischbach, and Christine Miller
(MIT, USA; Aalto University, Finland; University of Cologne, Germany; SCAD, USA)
In this paper, we describe the goals, organization and content of a global project course we have taught for the last six years, as well as challenges and lessons learned. The course has involved two to four sites and 30-40 students each year, both from Europe and the US. The students form project teams spanning several sites, and jointly perform creative tasks, thus learning both the course substance, as well as how to effectively work together in multicultural and multi-disciplinary distributed teams. We hope that our experiences described in this paper will help and encourage other universities to organize globally distributed project courses. In the future, we plan to continue working with this course, as well as search partners to develop a global software engineering project course together with other universities.

Developing a Pedagogical Infrastructure for Teaching Globally Distributed Software Development
Ed Keenan and Adam Steele
(DePaul University, USA)
Teaching students about Globally Distributed Software Development (GDSD) is becoming increasingly important as a significant percentage of current projects are being developed by globally distributed teams. We discuss the pedagogical infrastructure used to teach GDSD at DePaul University and its partner institutions. We cover the educational, technical and institutional challenges that need to be resolved in order to successfully partner with globally distributed teaching institutions in order to teach GDSD in a realistic environment.

An Evolving Collaborative Model of Working in Students' Global Software Development Projects
Christelle Scharff
(Pace University, USA)
This paper describes the main points of the evolution of the collaborative model of working of our annual global software development project that started in 2005. The global software development project unites students from up to five countries with different roles to work on the development of software together. This paper briefly summarizes the refinements of the focus, process, and tooling used on the project. Some of the findings are succinctly presented as well as our future steps.

Can Distributed Software Development Help the Practitioners to Become Better Software Engineers? Insights from Academia
Rafael Prikladnicki
(PUCRS, Brazil)
Distributed software development is a reality. While this area is increasing, it is also necessary to prepare software development professionals to develop software in distributed environments. With the evolution of this area, it has been observed that the experience acquired in DSD projects can help to improve the performance in traditional projects as well. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to explore in what extent the experience with DSD can improve the performance of software development professionals, even in collocated environments. Data was collected based on the evaluation of a DSD teaching experience in a course taught in Brazil. The preliminary results indicate that experiences lived in a distributed context could help software engineers to become better practitioners.

Teaching Distributed Software Engineering with UCOSP: The Undergraduate Capstone Open-Source Project
Eleni Stroulia, Ken Bauer, Michelle Craig, Karen Reid, and Greg Wilson
(University of Alberta, Canada; University of Toronto, Canada)
Software engineering courses in computer-science departments are meant to prepare students for the practice of designing, developing, understanding and maintaining software in the real world. The effectiveness of these courses have potentially a tremendous impact on the software industry, since it is through these courses that students must learn the state-of-the-art process and the tools of their eventual trade", so that they can bring this knowledge to their job and thus advance the actual state of practice. The value of learning software engineering" through project- based courses has long been recognized by educators and practitioners alike. In this paper, we discuss our experience with a distributed project-based course, which infuses the students' learning experience with an increased degree of realism, which, we believe, further improves the quality of their learning and advances their readiness to join the profession.

Avoiding Scylla and Charybdis in Distributed Software Development Course
Ivana Bosnić, Igor Čavrak, Marin Orlić, Mario Žagar, and Ivica Crnković
(University of Zagreb, Croatia; Mälardalen University, Sweden)
Teaching Distributed Software Development (DSD) is a challenging task. A convincing simulation of distributed environment in a local environment is practically impossible. Teaching DSD in distributed environment is more realistic since the students directly experience all its specifics. However, teaching in distributed environment, in which several geographically separated teams participate, is very demanding. Different types of obstacles occur, from administrative and organizational to technical ones. This paper describes some of the challenges, lessons learned, but also success stories of the DSD course performed now eight year in a row.

Student Motivation in Distributed Software Development Projects
Ivana Bosnić, Igor Čavrak, Marin Orlić, Mario Žagar, and Ivica Crnković
(University of Zagreb, Croatia; Mälardalen University, Sweden)
In this paper we discuss challenges faced in conducting distributed student projects within a scope of a distributed software development university course. Student motivation and demotivation factors, along with perceived cultural differences, are identified and analyzed on the basis of data collected from a number of student projects.

Teaching Software Engineering using Globally Distributed Projects: The DOSE Course
Martin Nordio, Carlo Ghezzi, Bertrand Meyer, Elisabetta Di Nitto, Giordano Tamburrelli, Julian Tschannen, Nazareno Aguirre, and Vidya Kulkarni
(ETH Zurich, Switzerland; Politecnico di Milano, Italy; University of Rio Cuarto, Argentina; University of Delhi, India)
Distributed software development poses new software engineering challenges. To prepare student for these new challenges, we have been teaching software engineering using globally distributed projects. The projects were developed in collaboration with eleven universities in ten different countries in Europe, Asia, and South America. This paper reports the experience teaching the course, describing the settings, problems faced organizing the projects and the lessons learned.

CTGDSD 2011 – Proceedings

Collaborative Teaching of Globally Distributed Software Development: Community Building Workshop (CTGDSD 2011)