GloSE-Lab: Teaching Global Software Engineering

In practice, more and more software development projects are distributed, ranging from partly distributed teams to global projects with each stakeholder located differently. Teaching actual practice in software engineering at university needs a proper mixture of theory and practice. But setting up practical exercises for global software engineering is hard, because students have to cooperate across different locations and situations reflecting the teaching intentions have to be provoked explicitly. This paper presents the concepts behind our common teaching environment for global software engineering - the GloSELab. It describes the experiences on setting up a distributed course and reports our teaching intentions based on each universities main focus: project management, requirements engineering & quality assurance, architecture, and implementation. Furthermore, we discuss our setup - a stage-gate process, where each location takes care of a different phase - and report occurred problems and how they supported or interfered with our teaching intentions.