REET '09 Proceedings of the 2009 Fourth International Workshop on Requirements Engineering Education and Training
An evolving collaborative model of working in students' global software development projects
Proceedings of the 2011 Community Building Workshop on Collaborative Teaching of Globally Distributed Software Development
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The project experience described in this paper builds upon three years of running global software development projects in an educational setting. It explicitly addresses some of the difficulties we have experienced in the past in getting students to deliver a quality software product at the end of a typical semester-long course in which Software Engineering is taught for the first time while a capstone project is concurrently undertaken. The initiative is unique in that it brings undergraduate, graduate and industry students together in a synergistic manner to capitalize upon individual learning needs and prior skill sets. To focus upon quality, coaches and auditors support traditional student teams with critical technical tasks. Working from identical requirements, a five-way competition affords multiple perspectives, improving the requirements, encouraging design diversity and so increasing the likelihood of the client receiving a deployable product. The fact that the development teams are in different geographic locations and that the software is required for a Cambodian client places soft skills entirely at the forefront. One of the software systems developed during this experience was selected by the client and is now successfully deployed in Cambodia. The paper reports on an educational model that has been seen to deliver results.