Exploring and Expanding GSE Education with Open Source Software Development

Abstract

Global software engineering (GSE) courses traditionally require cooperation between at least two universities so as to provide a distributed development environment to the students. In this study, we explore an alternative way to organize a global software engineering course where students work on open source software development (OSSD) projects rather than in a multi-university collaboration setting. The results show that the new setup may provide core GSE challenges as well as challenges associated with software development outsourcing and challenges related to working on large open source software. The present article compares the experiences gained from running a combined GSE and OSSD course against the experiences gained from running a traditional GSE course. The two alternatives are compared in terms of students' learning outcomes and course organization. The authors found that a combined GSE and OSSD course provides learning opportunities that are partly overlapping with, and partly complementary to, a traditional GSE course. The authors also found that the combined OSSD and GSE course was somewhat easier to organize because most of the activities took place in a single university setting. The authors used the extended GSE taxonomy for the comparison and found it to be a useful tool for this, although it had some limitations in expressive power. Therefore, two additional relationship dimensions are proposed that will further enrich the extended taxonomy in classifying GSE (and OSSD) projects. CCS Concepts: • Software and its engineering → Software development process management; Agile software development; Open source model; Programming teams;

Software Engineer Competencies in Global Software Development: An Indonesian Perspective

“…Ability to design a system backup and recovery [26] SC43. Ability to master advanced collaboration tools/techniques in distributed communication [7,[27][28][29] SC44. Ability to maintain privacy and security [25] SC45.…”

“…Ability to use and organise information and communication technology in a global context [7,35,16] SC72. Ability to communicate with teams of different cultures and personalities [7,2,35,28] SC73. Ability to build, develop and maintain social protocols in a distributed team [36] SC74.…”

“…Ability to hear and consider the thoughts of others [7,30] SC75. Ability to communicate through writing and conversation that is clear and fluent in a foreign languages [32,28] C8. Collaboration and Knowledge Management (soft) SC81.…”

“…Collaboration and Knowledge Management (soft) SC81. Ability to collaborate with multiple teams in different time zones [35,31,28] SC82. Ability to share information and knowledge in teams [7,2,37,38,18] SC83.…”

Cadxela: An educational tool for supporting the global software engineering education at undergraduate level

“…This approach (1) negatively affect the students' understanding of GSD features, (2) affects their confidence and ability to resolve conflicts during their participation in GSD projects, while also (3) failing to understand what may cause problems in organizational global contexts from a practical perspective and, consequently, how to efficiently solve them. In this regard, Hjelsvold and Mishra [23] state that it is vital that universities' curricula include educational requirements engineering activities so that students know, for example, how to effectively manage the distributed stakeholders' needs and expectations, as well as project management activities such as planning and estimation in distributed development environments. Moreover, any effort to complement undergraduate lecture-based courses on GSD must enable students to recognize how the main issues related to the 3Cs (i.e., communication, coordination, and control) and the three distances (i.e., geographical, temporal, and sociocultural) can negatively impact the performance, budget, and schedule of a GSD project.…”