A paper from the 2013 STEM Annual Conference.
This paper describes an International Software Engineering Group-Project Pilot. Students were given an opportunity to explore software development in an international team. Social computing (collaboration) software tools were used to enable communication and joint working. An Agile software development method was used. The pilot was conducted as an exploratory extra-curricula activity. The student volunteers were distracted by assignments and credit-bearing assessments. Also we noted that greater effort was required from supervisors to create a supportive management environment. Despite these shortcomings the pilot has subsequently been integrated into the syllabus at both the participating institutions and will be further explored in a subsequent phase of the study. Our international software engineering group project pilot provides graduate employability benefits by offering first-hand experience of a geographically distributed software development model.
