The Challenges of Teaching Students How to Work in Global Software Teams

This paper describes a multi-year project that is examining ways to improve global software learning teams. Students from the University of North Texas, Middlesex, University of Atilim, Middle East Technical University, and Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá are teamed and asked to collaborate on a number of different software projects. The paper explains the overall goals for the research project; it describes the student teams and their various assignments; and it presents results from data gathered from the group programming tasks. The findings are presented, and some recommendations for teaching global software development are provided.