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
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.