Olly Gotel

Working Across Borders: Overcoming Culturally-Based Technology Challenges in Student Global Software Development

Facilitated by the Internet, global software development has emerged as a reality. The use of shared processes and appropriate tools is considered crucial to alleviate some of its issues (e.g., space and time differences), homogenizing the environment of development and interaction, and increasing the likelihood of success. Since 2005, Pace University in the United States has been collaborating with the Institute of Technology of Cambodia (ITC) and the University of Delhi in India to bring students together to work on global software development projects. This paper reports on our experiences and lessons from spring 2007 when the focus was on these students working together on the development of a single software system. One key objective was to investigate how to create a shared and open source tooling environment to support a distributed development process that has evolved over two years. The setting is unique in that it seeks to accommodate students from a mix of established, developing and emerging countries who, as a consequence, have had varying levels of exposure to the Internet and use it in non-similar ways. The findings, lessons and recommendations from our study are reported in this paper. Not surprisingly, when the perceived professional value of assumed dasiaeveryday technologiespsila is dissimilar across cultures, preparation for the communications tooling needs more attention than the engineering tooling. This has important implications for the emphasis placed on dasiaprocesspsila and dasiasoft skillspsila in the respective classrooms, and highlights some challenges facing emerging countries as they strive to become players in the global workforce.

Preparing Computer Science Students for Global Software Development

This paper describes an innovative study undertaken in an undergraduate capstone software engineering course to give students exposure to the realities of global software development. In this study, students from Pace University in New York worked as part of an extended team with students from the Institute of Technology of Cambodia, developing software for Cambodian customers. This paper explains the goals of the study, describes the teams and their projects, and emphasizes the required logistics for a study of this nature. The findings are discussed, and some lessons for computer science education and global software development are provided. The paper finishes with a brief account of our continuing work in the area

Introducing global supply chains into software engineering education

This paper describes lessons from running software development projects across three globally distributed educational institutions. What was innovative about this study was that two of the institutions were located in service providing countries, conventional onshore/ offshore roles were reversed, and students were exposed to the realities of global supply chain management. Three teams of US students were tasked to develop three different software products for Cambodian clients, while sub-contracting the database component to third-party teams of Indian students. This paper details the role of the three institutions, the prerequisites for planning and logistics for running such educational projects, and summarises the findings, while drawing broader parallels with the commercial world of offshore and outsourced development. It ends with recommendations for software engineering education to better reflect the needs and skills demanded of right sourcing in the global marketplace. These extend more generally to global software engineering.

Teaching software quality assurance by encouraging student contributions to an open source web-based system for the assessment of programming assignments

This paper presents a novel and innovative pedagogical approach for teaching software quality assurance in the undergraduate computer science curriculum. The approach is based on students contributing programming problems to an open source web-based system that is used for student practice and instructor assessment of assignments. WeBWorK, and some of the latest web-based systems, use a mechanism based on unit testing to account for variation in the way in which the same problem can be answered in an accurate manner, making such systems highly appealing for education. Tackling open-ended programming problems within WeBWorK therefore requires students to write a code fragment that is then checked for semantic correctness. Given that WeBWorK is open source, the teaching approach that we have evolved revolves around students creating their own problems for other students to practice with. This requires students to construct comprehensive unit tests that can assure both the usability and accuracy of their work prior to deployment. The paper describes this approach, gives examples of student work, presents findings from the experience of using the approach in the classroom, and discusses broader lessons and reasons for integrating software quality assurance practices into the computer science curriculum.

Transitioning to Distributed Development in Students' Global Software Development Projects: The Role of Agile Methodologies and End-to-End Tooling

From 2005 to 2008, we explored different models of collaboration in student software development projects. In the past, project roles were distributed across students in the US, Cambodia, India and Thailand. What was common to our previous models was the co-location of developers, the client and quality assurance roles being the ones that were commonly distributed. A loose waterfall software development process was always used and activities were supported by a mashup of technologies. In 2009, we distributed the developers across the US, India and Senegal to form a truly distributed developer role. We also switched to the use of Agile methodologies with Scrum and to an end-to-end tooling solution, specifically the IBM Rational Team Concert environment. This paper describes the new model and reports on the evolution of our process and tooling infrastructure. In particular, it investigates how well Agile and Scrum practices supported our model and how important tooling is to their implementation. Initial guidelines for other educators are provided.

A Global and Competition-Based Model for Fostering Technical and Soft Skills in Software Engineering Education

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.

Extending and contributing to an open source web-based system for the assessment of programming problems

This paper describes the development of a web-based programming and assessment environment for use in supporting programming fundamentals courses (CS1, CS2) taught in Java. This environment is currently linked with WeBWorK, an open source web-based system developed at the University of Rochester that is popular for administering and assessing mathematics and physics coursework, but is designed for the potential integration with other course management system (CMS) environments. In addition to the traditional multiple-choice and short answer questions that have been augmented with the extensive randomization and customization routines of WeBWorK, this new environment (called WeBWorK-JAG where JAG stands for Java Auto Grader) can automatically collect and grade free-form program fragments written in Java. Novel pedagogy has been developed based on the capabilities of this extension and preliminary classroom results are discussed in this paper. For example, when students contributed to WeBWorK by creating WeBWorK-JAG questions for their peers, they are exposed to the reality of creating comprehensive unit tests and to the wider quality assurance aspects of formulating questions and their solution sets. This work is described in the context of an emerging commercial market for web-based programming assistants and its unique contributions are summarized.

Students as Partners and Students as Mentors: An Educational Model for Quality Assurance in Global Software Development

Since 2005, Pace University in New York City has been collaborating with the Institute of Technology of Cambodia and the University of Delhi in India to bring students together to work on globally distributed software development projects. Over this period, we have been exploring models through which graduates and undergraduates from the three countries can work together, with pedagogical value to all sides. In 2007, we converged on using Software Quality Assurance as a focal point around which to establish a partnering and mentoring relationship. We included seven graduate students, as internal mentors and external auditors, to help assure the quality of what was to be a single distributed project involving twenty-seven students from across the three global locations. To focus further on quality, requirements and testing activities were emphasized. The motivation, logistics and experiences from this project are reported in this paper, and lessons of wider applicability are provided.

Quality Indicators on Global Software Development Projects: Does "Getting to Know You" Really Matter?

In Spring 2008, five student teams were put into competition to develop software for a Cambodian client. Each extended team comprised students distributed across a minimum of three locations, drawn from the US, India, Thailand and Cambodia. This paper describes a couple of exercises conducted with students to examine their basic awareness of the countries of their collaborators and competitors, and to assess their knowledge of their own extended team members during the course of the project. The results from these exercises are examined in conjunction with the high-level communication patterns exhibited by the participating teams and provisional findings are drawn with respect to quality, as measured through a final product selection process. Initial implications for practice are discussed.

Flow diagrams: rise and fall of the first software engineering notation

Drawings of water are the earliest, least abstract forms of flow diagram. Representations of ideal or generalised sequences for manufacturing or actual paths for materials between machines came next. Subsequently documentation of production and information flow become subjects for graphical representation. A similar level of abstraction was necessary for representations of invisible flows such as electricity. After initial use to define control, flow diagrams became a general purpose tool for planning automated computation at all levels of composition. Proliferation of syntax variants and the need for a common language for documentation were the motivations behind standardisation efforts. Public communication of metalevel systems information superseded private comprehension of detailed algorithmic processes as a primary function. Changes to programming language structures and their associated processes caused the initial demise of flow diagrams in software engineering.