ICSE 2012 Workshops
2012 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)
Powered by
Conference Publishing Consulting

2012 Second International Workshop on Collaborative Teaching of Globally Distributed Software Development (CTGDSD), June 9, 2012, Zurich, Switzerland

CTGDSD 2012 – Proceedings

Contents - Abstracts - Authors

Second International Workshop on Collaborative Teaching of Globally Distributed Software Development (CTGDSD)

Preface

Title Page


Foreword
Software engineering project courses where student teams are geographically distributed can effectively simulate the problems of globally distributed software development (DSD). The purpose of the CTGDSD workshop is to build foster a community of international faculty and institutions committed to developing, supporting, and teaching DSD. Foundational materials presented will include pedagogical materials and infrastructure developed and used in teaching DSD courses along with results and lessons learned. Long-range goals include: lowering adoption barriers by providing common pedagogical materials, validated collaboration infrastructure, and a pool of potential teaching partners from around the globe. This year's workshop will also explore topics for collaborative research.

Experience and Lessons Learned Teaching DSD Courses

Towards a GSE International Teaching Network: Mapping Global Software Engineering Courses
Luiz Leandro Fortaleza, Tayana Conte, Sabrina Marczak, and Rafael Prikladnicki
(Federal University of Amazonas, Brazil; PUCRS, Brazil)
Teaching Global Software Engineering is challenging since it is not trivial to simulate distance and the changes that distance brings into the traditional software development life cycle. Despite the challenge, the need to teach undergrad and graduate students the skills to work in such environment is well-known in academia. The goal of this paper is two-folded. First, we identify what has been thought, by whom and to whom by conducting a literature review. This review aims to consolidate the body of knowledge on the topic in order to help professors and professionals interested in teaching the subject. For instance, we found that 19 courses have been reported involving 25 countries in total since 1997. Most of the courses involves graduate students as the main audience, and mainly discuss challenges in distributed development. Our second goal is to propose the creation of a collaborative repository to store and to report teaching experiences on the topic helping the development and strengthening of the Teaching Network community.

Five Years of Lessons Learned from the Software Engineering Course: Adapting Best Practices for Distributed Software Development
Crescencio Rodrigues Lima Neto and Eduardo Santana de Almeida
(RiSE, Brazil; Federal University of Bahia, Brazil)
Several companies around the world are using Distributed Software Development (DSD) to reduce costs and some Software Engineering courses are trying to simulate this distributed environment. This paper shows the experience faced by students during five years from the Software Engineering course performed at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil, which the objective was adapting the best practices from traditional development for DSD. Course lectures and materials educate students about software engineering best practices and DSD. The students developed a project organized into a set of work assignments that could be distributed across groups. At the end they learned to communicate and collaborate with each other, and they also believed that the course was helpful to them, which justifies the low number of dropouts. Most of the students, but not all, successfully completed their projects.

Teaching Software Engineering with Global Understanding
Junhua Ding and Biwu Yang
(East Carolina University, USA)
This paper reports the experiences and lessons learned of teaching a global course on software engineering to students in Africa and United States. The paper describes the course content, distributed software development project, the global teaching environment, assessment criteria, and results. Following the summary of the experiences and lessons learned from teaching the global course, we also discuss how to improve the teaching effectiveness of future global courses.

Student/Teacher Panel

Distributed Software Development Course: Students' and Teachers' Perspectives
Juraj Feljan, Ivica Crnković, Ivana Bosnić, Marin Orlić, and Mario Žagar
(Mälardalen University, Sweden; University of Zagreb, Croatia)
Students and teachers do not necessarily have the same understanding of a course – of the purpose, the objective, and in particular of the course elements – the way the course is performed, the examination procedure, and similar. In distributed-development courses, in which students and teachers are dispersed over different locations, this difference can be larger than in “ordinary” courses, but also less visible, due to limited communication. In this paper we discuss these different perspectives, their rationales, possible consequences on the course performance and on the result, as well as lessons learned from students’ feedback.

Experience and Recommendations for Distributed Software Development
Patrick Carlson and Nan Xiao
(Iowa State University, USA)
The following position paper outlines a software development course project for a semester long class on distributed software development. The developed application was an Android based facial recognition application which returned the name and contact information of people in a picture. Students from Iowa State University in the US, Jilin University in China, and the Federal Universidade da Bahia in Brazil participated. Challenges and solutions that were part of the development process as well as recommendations for future classes are provided.

Author Panel on DSD Processes

On the Difficulties for Students to Adhere to Scrum on Global Software Development Projects: Preliminary Results
Christelle Scharff, Samedi Heng, and Vidya Kulkarni
(Pace University, USA; Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium; University of Delhi, India)
We present the 2011 version of the Global Software Development project that we run annually. Developers were distributed across three countries to develop mobile solutions on the theme of sustainability. They followed the Scrum process and used the IBM Rational Team Concert tool. This study elicits the difficulties encountered by the students new to Scrum in adhering to its discipline. We examined if the causes of these difficulties were due to the fact that developers were distributed across time, distance, and culture. We also studied the impact of the chosen tooling.

Teaching a Globally Distributed Project Course Using Scrum Practices
Daniela Damian, Casper Lassenius, Maria Paasivaara, Arber Borici, and Adrian Schröter
(University of Victoria, Canada; Aalto University, Finland)
This paper describes the goals, design and initial challenges encountered in teaching a globally distributed software development course in collaboration between the University of Victoria, Canada and Aalto University, Finland. The project-driven collaboration course involved 16 students in Canada and nine students in Finland, divided into three globally distributed Scrum teams working on the same project. The teams worked on extending Agilefant, an open-source backlog management system, in direct interaction with its product owner. The collaborative development is based on the Scrum methodology. We describe how the Scrum methodology was implemented, and adapted to work in a distributed environment, as well as the infrastructure used to support collaboration, e.g. local war-rooms, and multiple communication tools. We conclude the paper with describing initial challenges encountered, including cultural, semester, course and curriculum differences, as well as technical and time-zone issues.

proc time: 0.01