Student group working across universities: a case study in software engineering

Distributed group working among teams of software engineers is increasingly evident in the “real world.” Tools to support such working are at present limited to general-purpose groupware involving video, audio, chat, shared whiteboards, and shared workspaces. Within software engineering education, group tasks have an established role in the curriculum. However, in general, groups are local to a particular university or institution and are composed of students who have a significant shared history (in terms of technical background and social interaction) and who are able to meet face-to-face on a regular basis. This paper reports on work undertaken by three U.K. universities to provide computer science students with the opportunity to experience group working across universities using low-cost tools to support distributed cooperative working.