On Educating Globally Distributed Software Development - a Case Study

Globally distributed software development is widely used in industry, for example, to stay competitive in the market. To achieve competitiveness one needs cost reduction, delivery of best quality, use of latest high-tech skills, as well as reliability and creativity. The key criteria for all these factors is well educated people. Yet, software engineering education hardly focuses the needs of distributed software development. Consequently, the graduated students rarely posses necessary skills and hands-on experience required for such projects; e.g. communication skills project and process management as well as knowledge management. This paper reports on a collaborative education project between the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, Research Centre for Information Technology (FZI) in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Polytechnic State University of St. Petersburg, Russia. The main goal of that project was to convey necessary skills to our students. The second goal was to investigate how different models of communication impact the project results.