Global vs. local — Experiences from a distributed software project course using agile methodologies

Global software engineering (GSE) has become common in the software industry. Distributed development work comes with many challenges, especially related to communication and coordination. Thus, it is essential to also teach and prepare the new population of software engineers to be aware of - and familiar with - these hurdles. We addressed this need by arranging a joint (agile) software project course between universities in Finland and Norway. We had three teams - one with students from both countries and two with students from the Norwegian university only. The students were given a teacher mentor, a handbook on agile practices and state-of-the-art tools for project management and software development. Apart from monitoring the teams´ progress, we also collected data from emails, questionnaires, student reports and interviews during and after the project. The main lesson learned is that the global and local teams are mostly facing the same challenges - especially when it comes to team building, clear project roles, and communication and management issues. Ultimately, our results show that the challenges were harder to solve by the global team and that not solving challenges in a timely manner had more serious consequences.