ABSTRACT
In addition to traditional technical skills, like modeling in UML, programming, databases and APIs, students of software engineering also need to learn how to work effectively in physically separated teams. The global nature of the software industry also requires students to learn to communicate with team members and stakeholders in different countries, with different cultures. Travel restrictions imposed to combat the Covid-19 pandemic have made it very difficult for students to spend a semester abroad. To enable students to gain international experience without leaving their home countries, a distributed course on global software engineering was conducted by two universities. Experiences with a focus on the student's perspectives are presented. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
In an age of geographically distributed software development teams, international communication skills are becoming ever more important to IT students. During the Covid-19 pandemic, contact and travel restrictions have made it almost impossible for students to gain international experience by spending a semester in a foreign country. One possible solution is to conduct distributed courses in software engineering as a virtual cooperation between two universities. Experiences gained during a hybrid, distributed course on global software engineering are presented. The challenges encountered when coordinating a course that takes place simultaneously in two countries are reported. Feedback from students and professors are discussed and recommendations for future work are derived from these lessons learned. © 2022 ACM.
ABSTRACT
The upheaval caused by the global Covid-19 pandemic has been an unavoidable driver of rapid digitalization in engineering education. The goal of this preliminary study was to test a prototype survey to identify and evaluate problems encountered by engineering students during the pandemic. A special focus was placed on students from historically underrepresented groups, first generation students, those with a migration background, students with disabilities and students with children. An online survey of students was conducted during the pandemic. Questions were posed regarding their experiences with distance learning, language difficulties, social, financial, psychological and child-care problems during the pandemic. Initial results identified problems common to all students as well as problems specific to certain students from historically underrepresented groups. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.
ABSTRACT
Global software engineering education faces unique challenges to reflect as close as possible real-world distributed team development in various forms. The complex nature of planning, collaborating, and upholding partnerships present administrative difficulties on top of budgetary constrains. These lead to limited opportunities for students to gain international experiences and for researchers to propagate educational and practical insights. This paper presents an empirical view on three different course structures conducted by the same research and educational team over a four-year time span. The courses were managed in Japan and Germany, facing cultural challenges, time-zone differences, language barriers, heterogeneous and homogeneous team structures, amongst others. Three semesters were carried out before and one during the Covid-19 pandemic. Implications for a recent focus on online education for software engineering education and future directions are discussed. As administrational and institutional differences typically do not guarantee the same number of students on all sides, distributed teams can be 1. balanced, where the number of students on one side is less than double the other, 2. unbalanced, where the number of students on one side is significantly larger than double the other, or 3. one-sided, where one side lacks students altogether. An approach for each of these three course structures is presented and discussed. Empirical analyses and reoccurring patterns in global software engineering education are reported. In the most recent three global software engineering classes, students were surveyed at the beginning and the end of the semester. The questionnaires ask students to rank how impactful they perceive factors related to global software development such as cultural aspects, team structure, language, and interaction. Results of the shift in mean perception are compared and discussed for each of the three team structures. Copyright © 2022 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.