Performing a Project in a Distributed Software Development Course: Lessons Learned

Distributed software development approaches have to face with several issues like cultural differences, collaboration and communication mechanisms, which can undermine the overall development success if not handled in a proper manner. In order to provide a real environment for students placed in different countries to learn and apply the best practices in distributed software development, a course has been developed jointly by two european universities. The course aims at providing the students an insight in the complexity of distributed development and giving the possibility to work in distributed teams for actual implementations, in order to minimize the gap between theory and practice. This paper describes the course design, challenges, results and success factors, from a students perspective.