The Process Is the Project

Recently I had the great pleasure of observing final project presentations given by students at San Francisco State University. The course, Global Software Engineering, taught by Gary Thompson of Sun and Dr. Dragutin Petkovic, Chair of the SFSU Computer Science Department, was a project management and collaboration course: project participation metrics. Each student project team created a web based application that gathers statistics from the collaborative development tools provided by java.net to allow university level instructors to assess and measure levels of teamwork within a collaborative development group.

I observed ten presentations. Six teams were all SFSU students; two teams included students from Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton as well as students from SFSU; and two teams included students from University of Fulda in Fulda, Germany as well as students from SFSU. I was particularly interested to hear about any communication issues and how decisions were made in the project teams. Of special interest to me was how these issues were handled when some team members were in different time zones, three or eight hours away, and some team members spoke different native languages. Most teams preferred to have frequent team phone meetings; other teams divided the work so that team members in different locations handled separate pieces of the work and phone meetings were less frequent.

Posted at 09:55PM Jan 14, 2009 by alta in General  |  Comments[0]