Software Engineering Across Boundaries : Student Project in Distributed Collaboration

• Geographically distributed software development projects have been made possible by rapid developments primarily within the data communication area. A number of companies recognize that distributed sollaboration has great potential for the near future. This report describes the empirical study of a cooperative student project located at two different geographical sites. The project was carried out at two universities, one in Sweden and one in finland. The initial goals were to give the students the opportunity to learn about the practical aspects of cooperation between two geographically seperate institutions and to study specific problems anticipated by the teachers with regard to communication, coordination, language, culture, requirements' handling, testing, and bug fixing. This report focuses on communication and coordination within the cooperative project as these were identified as the most significant problem areas. We also thought that these areas were the most interesting and the ones most likely to lead to improvements. This report not only describes our findings but also gives hints about what to think about when running similar projects both with respect to project related issues and teaching issues.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Programvaruteknik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Software Engineering (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap -- Mänsklig interaktion med IKT (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications -- Human Aspects of ICT (hsv//eng)

Keyword

co-operative/collaborative learning

cross cultural projects

interdisciplinary projects

pedagogical issues

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)