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.
Highlights
Software engineering students are required to attain more than just content knowledge
We will discuss and compare the two approaches to global software engineering (GSE) education based on our experiences
As can be seen in this table, 14 students participated in the traditional GSE course
Summary
Software engineering students are required to attain more than just content knowledge. Their 12 learning should include mastering skills and attitudes for developing software for real world usage, which is difficult to achieve inside classrooms alone. Mishra development companies to engage in distributed software projects (Lacity et al 2009; Persson et al 2009; Mishra and Mishra 2010, 2011, 2012). Academia is trying to simulate real world experiences by having students work in cross-university, distributed teams while developing software. These projects may have real or fake customers
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
