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SUMMARYThis paper tackles the need for universities and practitioners to train their students and engineers in the new challenges that global software development entails, which are principally related to communication, collaboration and cultural differences. Teaching the necessary skills requires practical experience. However, training in educational environments is difficult, and some challenging issues must still be confronted. We have focused our work on the development of a virtual training environment that can simulate global software development scenarios involving virtual agents (VAs) from different cultures. The VAs interact with learners, who use typical communication tools to solve predefined problems. This environment considers common problems caused by distance and cultural differences when using English as a means of communication. It allows learners to train at any time, because the VAs are always available, and it also permits them to play different roles in the various stages of the project. In this paper, we depict the design and development of the tool, as well as an initial evaluation.

Abstract-Sources of Global Software Development (GSD) information, such as academic literature, often focus on highlevel issues rather than on specific problems. Researchers tend to generalize problems and solutions; however, practitioners and instructors frequently need to identify real low-level scenarios and patterns in an effort to study specific problems and their solutions.We propose a method for collecting and defining GSD scenarios and related patterns. Scenarios depicting events that happen in certain GSD contexts associated with communication, coordination are central to this method. In this paper we show how problems and solutions extracted from these events can lead to the definition of patterns. Patterns describe generalized information that can be re-used in similar contexts.To facilitate knowledge sharing, we have integrated this pattern model into a GSD Community Web intended to promote collaboration between industry and academia. News, resources and discussion forums on GSD topics are also available through this website.

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