Global Software Engineering

Last night I participated in a colleague's defense of his masters thesis on global software engineering. Gary Thompson defended his thesis, "Teaching and Assessment Methods for Practical and Global Software Engineering Education," at San Francisco State University.

Very commonly in business we work in globally distributed teams. People from all over the world communicate, resolve design disagreements, contribute to the same code base, resolve code checkin conflicts. In open projects such as OpenSolaris, project team members are not even employees of the same company.

As common as this is in business, it is very uncommon in education. Students graduate with poor knowledge and little or no experience in global project team practices. To address this gap, Gary has been co-teaching, refining, evolving a course in Global Software Engineering for the last five or six years. See my previous blog post on this topic.

One surprising discovery from these student project teams is that teams whose members were all local to SFSU tended to employ the same project management practices as teams whose members were separated by eight time zones. All teams used tools such as email, IM, and Skype approximately the same amount. Teams whose members were all local did not necessarily meet face-to-face very often.

At the end there was time for questions from the audience. I said, if you have a project that will live longer than a semester, you must document how and why particular design decisions were reached. In Solaris and OpenSolaris, we have an architectural review process to archive documentation of these decisions. I was assured that when the students updated their specifications, they documented why the changes were made.

Another person asked whether there were any language problems in the global teams. Gary said there were some problems with the team in Germany: The professor in Germany reported that his team had trouble understanding the English of the SFSU students! Many of the SFSU students were not native English speakers. Again, the situation mirrors what you find in the business world. People who work in a particular location are not necessarily native to that location.

A very interesting and educational evening. I hope this type of program spreads to more schools.

Posted at 12:17PM Feb 25, 2009 by alta in General  |  Comments[0]