How Best to Teach Global Software Engineering? Educators Are Divided

GSE is an established eld, and nearly all practitioners and academics agree that graduating students must have experience in it. A report from the 20th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education reviewed the GSE education literature, exposed the challenges to teaching GSE, and provided a framework for meeting these challenges in a university setting.2 To stimulate debate on how to change current approaches to teaching software engineering to re ect the global workplace, Sarah Beecham asked Tony Clear, Daniela Damian, John Barr, John Noll, and Walt Scacchi to discuss how they inject realism into their courses. (This Oxford-style debate took place at the GSE education workshop at UC Irvine in August 2016; for workshop details, visit gse.sivrex.com.) Although they all agreed that changes are necessary, their approaches differed considerably. Clear and Damian argued that the best way to emulate the workplace is to engage in cross-university, multisite courses. In contrast, Barr suggested that having students contribute to open source projects gives them real-world experience without the overhead involved in crossuniversity courses. Finally, Noll and Scacchi argued for using online simulations and games to provide students a range of experiences that wouldn’t be possible within the constraints of a university term. The following provides an overview of the approaches they discussed, in their own words.