An Educational Environment for Training Skills for Global Software Development

Global Software Development (GSD) is a recent trend that allows team members to be located on different remote sites, thus forming a network of virtual teams working on the same projects which confront the typical problems caused by distance. The stakeholders involved in the project must be trained to deal with communication difficulties such as those related to cultural and language differences or the appropriate use of groupware tools when English is used as the lingua franca. We present a simulator which allows universities and companies to train students or inexpert engineers in the new challenges introduced by GSD, thus avoiding the problems that this activity entails in real settings. Our proposal places non-native English speakers in predefined virtual GSD scenarios in which they will interact with virtual agents of different cultures that play different roles in the project.