What is DSD?

What is DSD?

DSD stands for Distributed Software Development – software development with people distributed in different locations. Locations range from across a street to different countries and time zones. Distributed software development is also known as “Global Software Development” and “Virtual Organizations”.

 

Distributed Software Development is an alternative to buying a commercial off the shelf (COTS) software product, out sourcing, and “open source” development. It can be either component-based or collaboration-intensive development.

Information exchange and communication have a central place in DSD and special care should be taken in providing means of inexpensive personal communication.
Frequent and agile communication is a must – one team can't afford to wait for the second one to finish, one person can be kept waiting for an answer to an important question too long.
If the development is located in different countries, team members also learn about the other country's culture, and that makes their cooperation much easier.

DSD brings a lot of benefits: costs are lower – team members can work at home, development sites can be outside centers of large cities and development can be done in countries with lower labor costs.
People from different countries are involved in development, and it's easier to be more aware of the different cultures and to build multi-language products - in one word, it's easier to be closer to the customers.

 

OK, DSD, but what have you to do with it?

The general idea is to train students in a real distributed software development environment and to prepare them for such projects which they may undergo when they get employed.
During one semester, students from two different universities work together on software projects. They have frequent meetings and presentations of the current project progress. At the end, in their final presentation, they have to present their work and (hopefully) impress their customers (which in our case are project supervisors).

First university involved is located in Sweden. It’s Mälardalen University in Västerås, near Stockholm.
People in charge in Sweden are dr.sc. Rikard Land and prof.dr.sc. Ivica Crnković,
both from Department of Computer Engineering.

Second university involved in this project is Faculty of electrical engineering (FER) in Zagreb, Croatia.
People involved are dr.sc. Igor Čavrak and prof.dr.sc. Mario Žagar
from Department of Control and Computer Engineering (RASIP).