Five years of lessons learned from the Software Engineering course: Adapting best practices for Distributed Software Development

Several companies around the world are using Distributed Software Development (DSD) to reduce costs and some Software Engineering courses are trying to simulate this distributed environment. This paper shows the experience faced by students during five years from the Software Engineering course performed at the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil, which the objective was adapting the best practices from traditional development for DSD. Course lectures and materials educate students about software engineering best practices and DSD. The students developed a project organized into a set of work assignments that could be distributed across groups. At the end they learned to communicate and collaborate with each other, and they also believed that the course was helpful to them, which justifies the low number of dropouts. Most of the students, but not all, successfully completed their projects.