Thanwadee Sunetnanta

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.

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.

MUPRET: An Ontology-Driven Traceability Tool for Multiperspective Requirements Artifacts

Multiperspective requirements traceability (MUPRET) tool is resulted from our attempt in resolving the heterogeneity in traceability of multiperspective requirements artifacts. The MUPRET tool facilitates the automatic extraction and construction of requirements elements of an individual stakeholder into a so-called requirements ontology. As a result, multiperspective requirements artifacts of different stakeholders are captured in a common taxonomy imposed by the sharing base of requirements ontology. The tool then automatically generates traceability links by matching requirements ontologies. This paper presents the architecture of the MUPRET tool, together with an illustrative example of its applications.

A Risk Assessment Model for Offshoring Using CMMI Quantitative Approach

Risk analysis and assessment obviously provides valuable insights to offshoring projects to identify and evaluate the magnitude of risks associated with the activities and the work products being considered. In offshoring software industry, successful execution of risk analysis drastically relies on strong software process skills and management skills to resolve the differences in cultures, languages, time zones, and development which are used across distributed project teams. One way to ease such differences is to provide a model which offers a rational and automated basis for quantifying and monitoring risks and providing specific decision-making guidance while maintaining the nature of offshoring in a distributed manner. This paper presents an extension of our previous model of quantitative CMMI assessment. We further apply the best practices from the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) as a guideline for quantitative risk analysis in offshoring and using risk taxonomy from the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Taxonomy-Based Risk Identification. This work aims to reduce the process overhead of risk assessment by automatically collecting data from the project management repository to adequately and appropriately determine the approximate level of risk in offshoring projects.

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.

Quantitative CMMI Assessment for Offshoring through the Analysis of Project Management Repositories

The nature of distributed teams and the existence of multiple sites in offshore software development projects pose a challenging setting for software process improvement. Often, the improvement and appraisal of software processes is achieved through a turnkey solution where best practices are imposed or transferred from a company’s headquarters to its offshore units. In so doing, successful project health checks and monitoring for quality on software processes requires strong project management skills, well-built onshore-offshore coordination, and often needs regular onsite visits by software process improvement consultants from the headquarters’ team. This paper focuses on software process improvement as guided by the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and proposes a model to evaluate the status of such improvement efforts in the context of distributed multi-site projects without some of this overhead. The paper discusses the application of quantitative CMMI assessment through the collection and analysis of project data gathered directly from project repositories to facilitate CMMI implementation and reduce the cost of such implementation for offshore-outsourced software development projects. We exemplify this approach to quantitative CMMI assessment through the analysis of project management data and discuss the future directions of this work in progress.

Evolving an infrastructure for student global software development projects: lessons for industry

With the rapid increase in offshore outsourcing of software development, Global Software Development (GSD) has become the need of the hour. Todays information technology, in the form of communication networks and tooling opportunities, provides us with a supposedly ready infrastructure to support GSD. However, selecting an appropriate combination of tools that cross cultural boundaries and account for unique in-country connectivity situations is not a trivial task. In this paper, we describe our experience of evolving an infrastructure for student GSD projects over a period of four years, culminating in an environment to accommodate the needs of five different teams from four globally dispersed universities in countries straddling many technological divides. We suggest that our experience offers lessons that can also support those organizations embarking upon GSD initiatives and with their own infrastructure decisions to make.

Distributing Responsibilities to Engineer Better Requirements: Leveraging Knowledge and Perspectives for Students to Learn a Key Skill

Getting students to appreciate the value of writing high quality requirements can be a difficult undertaking. This paper spotlights an educational experience in which students from across the globe were brought together to write the requirements for a software development competition in order to address this challenge. To account for a disparity of educational backgrounds while promoting quality, a model was designed to include requirements coaching, reinforced requirements auditing cycles and multi-perspective triggers for requirements change. The paper describes the multiplicity of roles that were created and the strategies that were undertaken in an attempt to improve the quality of the written requirements, summarizes the outcomes of the experience, and highlights the observed costs/benefits of teaching this skill and conveying its value in this manner. The application of such a model to distributed software development projects more generally is discussed.

Global perceptions on the use of WeBWorK as an online tutor for computer science

Numerous (mostly commercial) Web-based systems for the assessment of programming assignments have emerged in the past few years to support the teaching and learning of programming fundamentals. WeBWorK, an initiative led by the University of Rochester to support Mathematics education, is unusual in that it is an open-source and extensible system. Since 2005, collaborators at Pace University and Cornell College have been working to adapt WeBWorK to extend its reach to Computer Science. This paper reports on a global experiment undertaken with Computer Science students and faculty from three continents based on the use of WeBWorK. Students in the US, Cambodia, India, Senegal and Thailand were presented with a set of programming exercises in a controlled environment. The intention was to explore the impact of diverse cultures, distinct first languages and differences in prior everyday exposure to the Internet and use of pedagogical tools on the usability and perceived value of such tools in Computer Science education. The study poses an important question with regard to the global uptake of everyday and typically US-centric educational technology. It provides findings likely to be of value to academic institutions interested in its adoption and companies interested in its commercialization.

Quality-Driven Competition: Uniting Undergraduates, Graduates and Professionals on Global Software Development Projects

This short paper describes an innovative project-based learning experience for software engineering education and training. A global software development project is currently underway to unite students from across the globe, with widely different backgrounds and learning objectives, in distinct project roles that are designed to leverage skill sets and foster overall quality and success. The background to this project is summarized in this paper, along with the motivation, set-up and governance model. A number of achievements from three years of sustained collaboration across the institutions make this educational model possible, and these are described together with the on-going challenges we are facing.