Teaching global software engineering by simulating a global project in the classroom

Globalization has long since found its way into software engineering. Many companies transfer part of their development activities to distributed countries in order to ensure their global competitiveness, gain access to local markets and react to the prevailing lack of specialized workforce. The global distribution of project teams introduces new challenges: Geographic separation, different time zones, remote communications, and culture and language barriers make the collaboration between team members more difficult. Instructors in universities are faced with the problem of how to make students with little or no experience aware of the challenges of Global Software Engineering and equip them with skills to deal with them. International practical courses are effective but require high organizational effort. In this paper, we describe an exercise for teaching Global Software Engineering in a single classroom and report on our experiences. The exercise simulates a global software project within three sites. Through the exercise, students experienced some of the aforementioned challenges and tried to deal with them in a simulated environment.