Employing an agile development methodology, particularly Scrum, in a distributed student project setting is challenging for both teachers and involved students. Allowing distributed student teams to self-organize and assign key Scrum roles using various strategies, specifically regarding the locations of students taking on key roles, increases the complexity of such projects. In addition, the interaction of the Project Owner role with the project customer, which occurs outside the distributed student team, adds a new dimension to this problem. This paper investigates the impact of various key role assignment strategies, and their interactions, on the performance of distributed student projects. Furthermore, we investigate the intensity of collaboration within the distributed team and between key project roles, as well as their impact on project performance. We analyzed data collected on 37 distributed student projects conducted over the course of eight academic years. The results reveal that letting students assign key project roles regardless of their location in the distributed team has no significant impact on the quality of project outcomes. However, a deeper analysis uncovers that more educationally desirable assignments of those roles exist; favoring increased collaboration intensity within distributed student teams.

Newly emerging and evolving technologies such as Cloud, Fog and Edge Computing, as well as Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems and Distributed Ledger Technology (such as blockchain) together with advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research are increasingly becoming a common and pervasive phenomenon in our everyday lives. Their co-evolution with society is driving the emergence of future socio-technical systems, which further promote ubiquitous entanglement between humans and machines. Fog, Edge and Dew computing as post-Cloud computing paradigms aim to relocate computing resources closer to end users in order to mitigate cloud-specific issues of highly centralized computation. Dew computing as the youngest of the post-cloud paradigms promotes human centered independence and collaboration between devices within scalable distributed computing infrastructures. Meanwhile, the field of artificial intelligence is adapting to recent challenges posed by user data privacy regulations as well as opportunities for applications on mobile devices based on their growing computational abilities. The usage of artificial intelligence in pervasive and scalable distributed computing systems is a natural step towards ubiquitous intelligent infrastructures and collaborative human and machine environments. Federated learning is an artificial intelligence technique enabling collaborative learning in distributed devices environment without sharing the training data sets, which are often private. This paper provides the overview of the federated learning paradigm showing that it inherently leverages both independence and collaboration, thus exemplifying implementation of dew intelligence within scalable distributed computing hierarchy.

This paper focuses on studying how distributed student teams organize their project work on a software product and how is their work division related to their architectural choices and geographical locations. We present our findings based on the data collected during five years of the long-lasting Distributed Software Development course running among three European universities. Student team decisions are analyzed on 19 distributed projects, carried out using the Scrum framework, and students' insights into this topic are discussed based on the data obtained from students' questionnaires and other course-related data sources. In addition, we investigate how this work division is related to the team dynamics, by analyzing teams' collaboration patterns and collaboration links between different team locations and work roles. The results show that although the students, in general, perceive the strong positive influence of architecture to the work division, younger generations of students tend to move away from dividing the work by location in order to form the sub-teams mixed by location, thus even improving the performance of their projects. A balanced collaboration, regardless of the physical location of sub-teams, might have a more beneficial effect on the quality of the resulting work than a strict work division over a distance.

Teaching Distributed Software Development with real distributed settings is a challenging and rewarding task. Distributed courses are idiosyncratically more challenging than standard local courses. We have experienced this during our distributed course, which has been run for 14 consecutive years. In this article, we present and analyze the emerging diversities specific to distributed project-based courses. We base our arguments on our experience, and we exploit a three-layered distributed course model, which we use to analyze several course elements throughout the 14-years lifetime of our distributed project-based course. In particular, we focus on the changes that the course underwent throughout the years, combining findings obtained from the analyzed data with our own teaching perceptions. Additionally, we propose insights on how to manage the various diversity aspects.

Various software engineering (SE) curricula in higher education have started including courses on global software engineering (GSE), carried out as internationally distributed project-based courses. These courses, known for their closeness to “real-world” work experience, emphasize the importance of involving industry partners as customers and focus on soft skills essential for employment, an aspect often neglected in engineering education. However, not many such courses are long-lived or consistent in form throughout the years, making their impact and relevance hard to assess. The Distributed Software Development course (DSD), currently run among three universities in Croatia, Italy, and Sweden, has now been carried out for 15 years consecutively, providing a rich source of in-course and post-graduation data. To evaluate the students’ experiences of the course after they graduate and start working, a study has been carried out among former DSD students from the University of Zagreb, Croatia. Its goal is to understand how useful this course was in students’ early careers, both in first and current employment, as well as related factors at the workplace (magnitude of distributed collaboration, company size). The study results show the relevance of such distributed course experiences for future employment, as well as the importance of building upon soft skills as part of the software engineering curricula. Higher education institutions are invited to consider including such courses in the software engineering curriculum, for the benefit of their students and, indirectly, students’ future employers.

Global software engineering education is steadily advancing to fully prepare students for future challenges at work, by providing opportunities for real-life experiences, especially in distributed project-based courses. These international student teams are, as in real companies, susceptible to various risks stemming from different internal and external factors, being the sources of stress and impacting team resilience.

Distributed Software Development course is a joint project-based course involving three universities, from Croatia, Sweden and Italy, running each year since 2003. Distributed student teams work on all phases of a complex software engineering project, solving several challenges of working in a global environment, thus obtaining a valuable experience for their future careers. The course is very well received by both the students and course partners from the industry.

This paper describes the process of assigning students to project teams in a global software development course. Project proposals vary in several characteristics in order to provide students from two universities, who have highly heterogeneous knowledge, a wide range of choices. Students submit an initial questionnaire about their skills, together with ranked project preferences. Based on 24 projects and 155 students in last three years of the course, project types and criteria such as students' knowledge of programming languages or development platforms are analyzed and presented.

The need for educating future software engineers in the field of global software engineering is recognized by many educational institutions. In this paper we outline the characteristics of an existing global software development course run over a period of nine years, and present a flexible project framework for conducting student projects in a distributed environment. Based on data collected from fourteen distributed student projects, a set of collaboration patterns is identified and their causes and implications described. Collaboration patterns are a result of the analysis of collaboration links within distributed student teams, and can assist teachers in better understanding of the dynamics found in distributed projects.

This paper describes different aspects of teaching distributed software development, regarding the types of project customers: industry and academia. These approaches enable students to be more engaged in real-world situations, by having customers from the industry, local or distributed customers in universities, distributed customers in software engineering contests or being involved in an ongoing project, thus simulating the company merging. The methods we describe are used in a distributed project-oriented course, which is jointly carried out by two universities from Sweden and Croatia. The paper presents our experiences of such projects being done during the course, the differences in each approach, issues observed and ways to solve them, in order to create a more engaging education for better-prepared engineers of tomorrow.