Global Software Engineering in a Global Classroom

Due to globalization, many software projects have become large-scale and distributed tasks that require software engineers to learn and apply techniques for distributed requirements analysis, modeling, development, and deployment. Globally-distributed projects require special skills in communication across different locations and time zones in all stages of the project. There has been advancement in teaching these concepts at universities, but adapting global software engineering in a curriculum is still in infancy.The main reasons are the effort and coordination required by teachers to set up the project, manage distributed development and enable distributed delivery. It becomes even more difficult when teaching distributed software engineering involving Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The situation has changed with recent advances in continuous deployment and cloud platform services that make globally-distributed projects more feasible, teachable, and learnable, even for short-term projects. However, no experience report in education research describes a truly distributed global setup in continuous software engineering for IoT applications.This paper describes a ten-day project involving three universities in different countries with 21 students located across the world to substantiate this claim. It provides teachers with recommendations for conducting a global software engineering course in a global setting. Recommendations include access for all students to (remote) hardware, stable network infrastructure in all locations, the use of a central development platform for continuous integration and deployment, and the application of distributed pair deployment.