HCC: Improving the Performance of Global Software Development Learning Teams

University Of North Texas, Denton TX

Investigators

Abstract

This research proposes to help students work more effectively in global software teams. The project will involve researchers from Turkey, Panama, and England along with industrial advisors from Travelocity and Lockheed and will focus on issues related to teaching undergraduate computer science students how to use computer-supported collaborative tools to work together to develop large software applications. Researchers will enhance a Web service infrastructure that can support collaborative software tools and use it in advanced programming courses offered at each of the four Universities. The courses will allow researchers to examine how 'distance' factors such as time, geography and culture affect globally distributed student learners. Data gathered from student interactions will then be used to create strategies that will improve collaboration among the culturally, spatially, and temporally dispersed learning teams. The result of this research will be a model and technology that will focus on the problems related to teaching global software development. These problems include teaching students how to use collaborative software, be members of a culturally diverse work team, manage time, organize ideas, and chat (communicate) with one another. This project will examine ways to use technology to help students learn how to overcome barriers of time, space and culture. The proposed research represents an important contribution by teaching students how to work in culturally mixed dispersed teams. It will also contribute to practical knowledge about how to support distributed learning teams by determining which specific individual, spatial-temporal, and cultural factors are important and how they interact in the context of a computer supported collaborative environment. It will also test whether specific problems can be remediated through direct or indirect intervention, and whether these remediation strategies actually improve group performance. Although this study will occur in the context of a programming course, the results will have implications for geographically distributed collaborative learning teams in general. It should also have an effect on broadening the experiences of all students who participate in the study by exposing them to people from different cultures and nationalities