A Crash Undergraduate Course in Global Software Engineering

Teaching Software Engineering must adopt new approaches to respond to the rapid globalization of software development. This puts pressure on instructors to select focused course contents to prepare students for working in global environments. This paper presents an innovative approach to teaching Software Engineering and which emphasizes the learning of project managements skills as well as the most important software development concepts in an environment which simulates a geographically distributed environment. Our approach is to synchronize class teaching with the development of real-world software projects in a setting designed to simulate geographically distributed working environments. The theoretical part of the course is Object-Oriented-centric, whereas the practical part is the larger part and is facilitated through two projects and which are designed to simulate real-world environments with global customers where students from different courses collaborate to play different roles. The projects give students skills in using the Agile and Spiral models.