In software engineering, leading trends can be detected that will affect the characteristic features of a product and its development process. On a product level, the growth of size and complexity is apparent-but on the one hand only. On the other hand, there is also a growing demand for simple and reasonable small software products executed by handheld terminals and smartphones; these applications are in many cases expected to collaborate with databases over the Internet. In addition, different kinds of service concepts (ASP, SaaS) are becoming recognized alternatives to the traditional way of buying software. Increasingly, software products are also distributed in a wide geographical scope to users with different cultural backgrounds and expectations. In software engineering work, as a consequence of this growth in size and complexity, the development work is more and more often distributed. The software business itself is becoming global because of acquisitions, offshoring, and international subcontracting. The globalization of work sets new requirements to the engineering processes: in international teams the organisational and cultural differences of the development subteams have to be recognized. In this paper, the focus is on the software development and its global dimension-especially the roles of multi-cultural and cross-organizational issues in software engineering. Our paper presents the results of the first phase of our three phases research project related to ''Culture-Aware Software Engineering.'' The main result of the first phase is the multi-cultural software engineering working model introduced in our paper. Culture is seen as one example of the context, i.e. the situation at hand. The concept of culture has also different meanings, which have to be understood in well-organized software engineering. Software engineering work is analyzed as a knowledge creation process, in which both explicit and tacit

Our Work in Progress Paper in Innovative Practice Category focuses on how learners' experience use of infographics in advanced level e-course on requirements engineering (RE). Infographics are visual representations of information in such a way that information can be easily understood at a glance. Most of the previous infographics studies have been conducted in the context of inquiry learning. To complement this research, we studied how learners experience use of infographics as a method for reflective assignment and hence if the usage of infographics supported conceptualization about RE. We adopted a qualitative content analysis approach, applying thematic network analysis to the data received from five case learners. This approach proposes graphical networks as an aid for analyzing and synthesizing qualitative data into basic, organizing, and global themes. The thematic network analysis produced two global, seven organizational, and 53 basic themes. The global themes were named "Visual literacy" and "Conceptualization". In addition, the e-course supervisor evaluated learners' infographics according to assessment criteria. Based on these analyses, learners can, using infographics, concentrate on essential topics, distill information, and develop their skills for visual literacy and conceptualization. The results suggest that infographics can be successfully utilized in reflective courses assignments that are typically produced as linear texts.

Abstract-Providing feedback to learners on their writing assignments is one of the most important and time-consuming tasks that a supervisor performs. In e-Education environments, especially in the case of distance learning, giving feedback becomes more challenging because there are often no opportunities for face-to-face interaction. Typically, a supervisor provides comments to learners in written form via email; however, the use of recorded audio feedback (RAF) in e-Education environments has become a viable alternative. This work in progress reports on learners' perceptions of RAF in a multi-cultural higher eEducation context. Our observations indicate that learners tend to have positive feelings toward RAF and that RAF potentially moderates cultural effects. The observations are discussed in light of the relevant literature, and future research questions are proposed.

Adapting icons in requirements engineering can support the multifaceted needs of stakeholders. Conventional approaches to RE are mainly highlighted in diagrams. This paper introduces icon-based information as a way to represent ideas and concepts in the requirements engineering domain. We report on icon artifacts that support requirements engineering work such as priority types, status states and stakeholder kinds. We evaluate how users interpret meanings of icons and the efficacy of icon prototypes shaped to represent those requirements attributes. Our hypothesis is whether practitioners can recognize the icons' meaning in terms of their functional representation. According to the empirical data from 45 participants, the findings demonstrate the probability of providing users with icons and their intended functions that correspond to RE artifacts in a novel yet effective manner. Based on these findings, we suggest that icons could enrich stakeholders' perception of the RE process as a whole; however, meaningful interpretation of an icon is subject to the user's prior knowledge and experience.

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