Teaching Global Software Engineering: Interactive Exercises for the Classroom

Companies transfer part of their development activities to distributed countries in order to ensure their global competitiveness, gain access to local markets and react to the prevailing lack of specialized workforce. Global Software Engineering has brought new challenges to development teams: Geographic separation, different time zones, different culture and language barriers. They introduce communication delay and often lead to quality problems and cost overruns. Despite these challenges Global Software Engineering has become a mainstream trend in industry. However, university instructors face the difficulty how to make students with little or no experience in global software development aware of these challenges and equip them with skills to deal with them. In this paper, we describe a set of interactive exercises for teaching Global Software Engineering in a single classroom and report on our experiences.