Emulating a corporate software development environment through collaboration between student projects in six courses

Corporate software development often takes place within a complex organizational structure, potentially encompassing many individuals. With constant improvements in network and communication technologies, those organizations may be widely distributed through time and space. In computer science and education, group projects are typically included as part of an undergraduate and graduate engineering curriculum to help prepare students for the dynamics of the business workplace. However, the groups tend to be much smaller than those typically found in the international corporate world where engineers are required to participate in large groups that are dispersed through geography and time zones. We describe a collaboration between student projects in six courses that aims to emulate such an international corporate software development environment. The collaboration brought together three faculty members and over 90 undergraduate and graduate students to work on a software project for a real client. Through this experience, we learned valuable lessons regarding the importance of communication and coordination between the faculty and student participants in a large-scale project.