Offshore software development: Transferring research findings into the classroom

Abstract

Distributed software projects are becoming increasingly commonplace in industry. Yet, software engineering education rarely graduates students with the necessary skills and hands-on experience that are particular to off-shore software development projects. Three key areas in successful offshore software development projects are well documented in the literature as communication, knowledge management, as well as project and process management. This paper maps tasks within each of these three areas to functions that have to be provided by remote collaboration platforms and tools that distributed projects rely on. A case-study of an off-shore requirements engineering class experience between a Master course of Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico and a customer in a Swiss financial institution shows a correlation between areas of learning by the students and functionalities covered with the tools used in the classroom. The paper identifies additional tools, developed by the authors, which will provide additional functionalities in the deficient areas to increase the learning and preparation of the students for off-shore software development projects. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.