Teaching Global Software Engineering - A Practical Experience

Since software is no longer developed by one enterprise which is located at one single site only, modern software engineers have to strive for distinct skills and capabilities allowing them to work together on a global scale. When conjointly designing, implementing, and testing different software components, these distributed engineers will also have to contribute their local know-how and countryspecific experience in order to guarantee the final success of the software project. As a prominent branch of research regarding this world-wide software engineering process, the discipline of Global software engineering (GSE) has gained increased attention over the past years. However, when taking a closer look on today’s universities curricula, the transfer and intermediation of GSE can be presently seen as an emerging activity. This report presents the main results and lessons learned when teaching GSE by means of the execution of four software engineering projects at Technische Universität München during the winter term 2009/10. The overall objective of these projects was to allow globally distributed student teams to work conjointly on a software engineering task aiming at enhancing their project management and communication skills by taking differences in geographical location, academic curriculum, and culture into consideration. In depicting the general outcome of the four projects in the form of the individual student report, the document describes both, the specific content of each GSE project as well as the organizational issues student members were facing in the course of their work. Additionally, the report provides guidance for future GSE activities at universities by pointing out the experience made and the knowledge gained on the part of the teaching staff.