An experiment on teaching coordination in a globally distributed software engineering class

The importance of planning and management skills in software development is very difficult to convey in software engineering courses. We present the synopsis of an assignment whose purpose is to demonstrate the significance of such skills, including effective communication, team coordination and collaboration, and overall project planning. The assignment is organized in the context of a distributed software engineering course carried out in collaboration with 12 universities in South America, Europe and Africa. The assignment is a globally distributed contest issued before most development activities related to the course's software project are performed, aiming at favoring the collaboration between students prior to project development. The contest does not involve any programming, and is not related to the project development activities. Instead, it consists of making teams in different countries compete in collaboratively solving a set of very simple tasks. The complexity of the activity is in team collaboration and coordination, and their lack is evident when the tasks are not correctly solved, or not solved in time. Despite the simplicity of the as-signment, students have found it useful in helping them understand the significance of management and planning challenges in distributed software development. Moreover, the assignment helped in team building, by creating a better team atmosphere and contributing in identifying team members better suited for management.