Distributed Cross-Cultural Student Software Project: A Case Study

Software is more and more developed in international cooperative efforts where project team members have different educational and cultural backgrounds and the team may even be distributed among sites in several countries. Software engineering education should also involve distributed and cross-cultural project work to prepare the future software developers for this kind of work environment. In a pilot project of two universities in Finland and in Russia a cross-cultural student team gathered experience by developing a common software product in a distributed project. While in general the project was successful, the team encountered some problems mainly due to the need to work in a foreign language and the practical limitations of remote connections