Growth of newcomer competence: challenges of globalization

The transfer of entire projects to offshore locations, the aging and renewal of core developers in legacy products, the recruiting in fast growing Internet companies, and the participation in open source projects, present similar challenges of rapidly increasing newcomer competence in software projects. In particular, culture differences, communication complexity, and the rapid influx of developers with little or no project knowledge common in these phenomena pose practical and research questions for software engineering. For example, how do different cultures impact project learning? Are there best practices for competence-enhancing communication? How to learn from the experiences of top developers to improve the training of newcomers? What resources and tools can be provided to help newcomers learn faster and become more productive? These questions sketch a project-learning-focused agenda needed to address outlined challenges. We propose how emerging measurement methods utilizing rich data in software repositories and the theoretical frameworks based on cognitive and organizational science may be applied to address these challenges and to improve understanding of how humans learn.