An Immersion Program to Help Students Understand the Impact of Cross Cultural Differences in Software Engineering Work

Globalization and the attendant demands on multicultural teams have placed new emphasis on ensuring that software engineering students understand the real impacts of social and cultural differences on software engineering work. Cultural differences have specific impacts because our own values are innate. This blind spot can be an extreme hazard when it comes to delivering software that functions properly, is on time and on budget.This paper will present the details of an educational program designed to sensitize software engineers to cultural differences by cultural immersion. It will explain how the program addressed four areas of software engineering work that are susceptible to cross cultural influences, 1) process primitives, 2) abstract representation, 3) oversight and control and 4) optimization.