Instructor or project manager: What is the right balance as software engineering education goes global?

Abstract

This paper reflects upon three years of experience of running Global Software Development projects for students distributed across three countries. The paper focuses almost exclusively on the instructorspsila perspective of such projects and articulates the various Project Management concerns that instructors from the participating institutions need to consider and agree upon to both collaborate on such an international initiative and to run the constituent student projects. Each decision made has implications for instructor workload, institutional relationships and the kind of pedagogical experience that students will receive. The paper uses the Project Management Body of Knowledge as a framework through which to delineate the concerns and types of decision that need to be taken, to explain some of the challenges we faced and strategies we developed to overcome them. The paper seeks to provide guidance to other instructors who are considering the Global Software Development path for their student Software Engineering projects, based upon our experiences of uniting over one hundred students and seven instructors, and suggests critical questions that need to be examined a priori to any such new effort.