Course objectives

When planning the course from the design point of view, both sides first agreed upon course objectives. Initial survey amongst potential students showed global interest for the topic, but since the general student awareness for the issues concerning the DSD was relatively low, lecturers and other teaching assistants had to primarily rely on professional body of knowledge in the field of DSD and key issues documented in various books and papers, as well on their own experiences in past collaboration on joint IT projects with different European firms.

It was concluded that by the end of this course, students should be able to:

• identify the differences between classical software development and DSD
• identify centrifugal and centripetal forces found in DSD teams
• assess and evaluate technologies that are used to facilitate DSD
• identify reasons behind corporate decisions to outsource software development to other countries
• understand importance of cultural differences on the DSD project management, communication and collaboration
• recognize key obstacles in the process of DSD
• apply best practices of DSD in their professional work

To achieve these goals it was necessary to blend theory and practice, utilizing constructivist approach to teaching when possible. In the second part of the course, problem based learning through student software engineering projects begins to dominate, giving students opportunity to map experiences with theoretical knowledge acquired in the first part of the course.

Course objectives listed previously were achieved by following means:

• presentation of theoretical background of the matter, so that during practical part students become familiar and develop best practices as well as workarounds for common pitfalls. The theoretical part includes:
  • reasons behind necessity to collaborate with distributed teams in the global IT economy
  • project management issues in DSD
  • software development in pervasive computing
  • Unified modeling language (UML) as an OO software design tool
• bringing in guest lecturers:
  • a software professional or IT manager from corporate software development world to discuss his/hers experiences with students
  • professional psychologist with expertise in cultural issues to lead a fruitful discussion on defining a sensitive borderline between common ethnical and national stereotypes and real characteristics of a certain ethnic society, including understanding of typical high and low context cultures, processes of building trust and decision making, common sets of values and beliefs, etc.
• design of meaningful set of student software development projects that would, at the same time, facilitate:
  • gaining experiences in DSD project management, communication and collaboration;
  • producing software that helps DSD
  • producing high quality project documentation using prepared templates
  • adapting to the level of knowledge and language specifics of another distributed team
  • role-playing as a powerful tool for students to experience being a software development manager, with real-life set of duties and responsibilities.