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This paper describes different aspects of teaching distributed software development, regarding the types of project customers: industry and academia. These approaches enable students to be more engaged in real-world situations, by having customers from the industry, local or distributed customers in universities, distributed customers in software engineering contests or being involved in an ongoing project, thus simulating the company merging. The methods we describe are used in a distributed project-oriented course, which is jointly carried out by two universities from Sweden and Croatia. The paper presents our experiences of such projects being done during the course, the differences in each approach, issues observed and ways to solve them, in order to create a more engaging education for better-prepared engineers of tomorrow.

Teaching Distributed Software Development with real distributed settings is a challenging and rewarding task. Distributed courses are idiosyncratically more challenging than standard local courses. We have experienced this during our distributed course, which has been run for 14 consecutive years. In this article, we present and analyze the emerging diversities specific to distributed project-based courses. We base our arguments on our experience, and we exploit a three-layered distributed course model, which we use to analyze several course elements throughout the 14-years lifetime of our distributed project-based course. In particular, we focus on the changes that the course underwent throughout the years, combining findings obtained from the analyzed data with our own teaching perceptions. Additionally, we propose insights on how to manage the various diversity aspects. CCS Concepts: • Social and professional topics → Software engineering education;• Applied computing → Collaborative learning;•Software and its engineering → Software development methods;

Various software engineering (SE) curricula in higher education have started including courses on global software engineering (GSE), carried out as internationally distributed project-based courses. These courses, known for their closeness to “real-world” work experience, emphasize the importance of involving industry partners as customers and focus on soft skills essential for employment, an aspect often neglected in engineering education. However, not many such courses are long-lived or consistent in form throughout the years, making their impact and relevance hard to assess. The Distributed Software Development course (DSD), currently run among three universities in Croatia, Italy, and Sweden, has now been carried out for 15 years consecutively, providing a rich source of in-course and post-graduation data. To evaluate the students’ experiences of the course after they graduate and start working, a study has been carried out among former DSD students from the University of Zagreb, Croatia. Its goal is to understand how useful this course was in students’ early careers, both in first and current employment, as well as related factors at the workplace (magnitude of distributed collaboration, company size). The study results show the relevance of such distributed course experiences for future employment, as well as the importance of building upon soft skills as part of the software engineering curricula. Higher education institutions are invited to consider including such courses in the software engineering curriculum, for the benefit of their students and, indirectly, students’ future employers.

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