An experience in collaborative software engineering education

Large-scale software development requires the interaction of specialists from different fields who must communicate their decisions and coordinate their activities. As global software development becomes mainstream, software engineers face new challenges for which they have received little or no training. To help a new generation of software developers better understand the industry's globalization and familiarize them with distributed, collaborative development, we designed a course entitled the Distributed Software Engineering Laboratory. In the class, pairs of students from different countries work as a virtual organization overseeing the whole software development process. We describe the lessons we have learned in this course and propose a framework useful in dealing with some of the difficulties participants face.