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Experiences of International Software Development Project Cooperation

The Senior Development Project as a capstone research project is a new level of distance and collaborative education that enables students to form different cultures and time zones to work together on real projects in a controlled, academic setting, but in a manner that mirrors business and industry projects to a very significant degree. Three instructors are delivering this course jointly on three continents. Students form joint teams of 6 – 7 team members that are not just international, but also multidisciplinary – Web and Mobile Computing (WMC) students work together with Computing and Information Technologies (CIT) and also, more recently, Human-Centered Computing (HCC) students. Generally, CIT students are responsible for system design and infrastructure development, WMC students for software development, and HCC students for user experience. Students work on projects that are industry-based, with sponsors located worldwide. This creates a real need for the students to deal with the many issues of distributed teams, project coordination, and customers. Each year students work on different projects and over the last three years we offered multiple projects randomly divided on teams – each team works on a single project, but about four teams on average work on any particular project, competing with each other. Particularly in the early stages of the project, this mimics the typical situation of multiple vendors bidding on a single project. The best team projects are implemented at sponsor sites at the end of the two-semester Capstone research project course, giving the students honors and reference for further project work needed in the industry.

Software Development Project

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