Teaching Global Software Engineering in a Remote Customer Environment

Global software engineering environments feature a remote customer in many of today’s software engineering projects. We developed a university course design to better match these real-world conditions with developer teams comprised of European students and customer teams comprised of Indian students. Our distributed student teams were asked to autonomously find the best way to overcome the three big challenges in global software engineering, communication, cooperation and coordination, and establish a working relationship between developer team and customer team. Key findings include that language difficulties and cultural differences were among the hardest challenges to overcome. Post-course feedback was very positive, as both European and Indian students highly valued the realistic learning experience, even though Indian students noted that they would prefer to be on the development team.