Distributed development: an education perspective on the global studio project

The Global Studio Project integrated the work of Software Engineering students spread across four countries into a single project and represented, for most of the students, their first major "real-world" development experience. Interviews indicated that the major areas of learning were informal skills that included learning to establish and work effectively within a team, learning how to react quickly to frequent changes in requirements, architecture and organization, and learning to manage and optimize communications. Since all these skills require rapid reaction to unpredictable factors, we view them as improvisation and discuss the role of experiential education in facilitating improvisation.