Vidya Kulkarni

Teaching software engineering using globally distributed projects: the DOSE course

Distributed software development poses new software engineering challenges. To prepare student for these new challenges, we have been teaching software engineering using globally distributed projects. The projects were developed in collaboration with eleven universities in ten different countries in Europe, Asia, and South America. This paper reports the experience teaching the course, describing the settings, problems faced organizing the projects and the lessons learned.

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.

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.

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.

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.

From Student to Software Engineer in the Indian IT Industry: A Survey of Training

The benefits of Global Software Development are now well known and India currently has the lion’s share in outsourced offshore software development. As a result, the demand for skilled IT professionals is increasing in India. In order to meet the demand, new academic institutes are being established and the existing ones are increasing their intake in IT-related courses. However, according to the latest report of the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) in India, only 25% of the fresh graduates are considered readily employable by the IT industry. To undertake their jobs effectively, most of the companies provide training to fresh recruits before putting them on actual jobs. In order to understand the nature of the training that is conducted, the topics that are covered, and the adequacy of the preparatory education for the first job in the IT industry, two surveys were administered. One was conducted with human resource managers of some of the leading IT companies in India and another was conducted with fresh company recruits. The findings are reported in this paper and recommendations for the curriculum are proposed.

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.

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.