Teaching Globally Distributed Software Development: An Experience Report

Companies around the world routinely distribute their software development across different sites. Students, however, rarely get a chance to learn the potential problems that arise, and the potential solutions to those problems, when conducting distributed development. It is especially difficult to simulate the situation for students when development is distributed across time zones and cultures. We have developed a course that requires teams of students at widely separated universities to collaborate with each other to complete a software development project. Instances of the course have been presented four times using combinations of five different universities, and we are seeking to create a larger pool of universities interested in and capable of presenting it. This paper discusses our goals, the characteristics of the course and the results of teaching it, with a primary result that all the universities want to and will offer the course again.