On preparing students for distributed software development with a synchronous, collaborative development platform

  • Authors:

  • Andrew Meneely;Laurie Williams

  • Affiliations:

  • North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA;North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 40th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Working remotely is becoming the norm for both professionals and students alike. Software development has become a global industry due to outsourcing, teleworking, flex time, and companies' desire to use the best and/or most economical talent regardless of where that talent is located. Professionals are not alone because students usually work from home despite having sufficient resources on campus. In this paper we share our experiences from using Jazz, a synchronous, collaborative development platform, with our inevitably distributed software engineering students. Eleven students optionally used the tool while working on a five-week team project. Students primarily used the version control, chat, and work item features in Jazz. We collected their reactions in retrospective essays and found that all Jazz students supported using Jazz in future semesters of the course. We also examined grade differences and found that the students who used Jazz were more successful than those who did not use Jazz.