Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Software Industry
Umesh Bellur
umesh.bellur@iitb.ac.in
School of Information Technology, IIT Bombay
Powai, Mumbai 400076, India
system with a high degree of coupling. The situation can Both of these aspects target traditional software development
get worse with circular dependendencies and particular practices which is primarily single site development. Another
attention needs to be paid to this. The introduction of unfortunate aspect is the theoretical nature of how these
Proceedings of the 30th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC'06)
0-7695-2655-1/06 $20.00 © 2006
Authorized licensed use limited to: MEF Universitesi. Downloaded on January 05,2022 at 16:28:51 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
courses are conducted - rarely are real projects offered and The other interesting aspect of this course will be the focus
accomplished in a professional manner. This makes these on global software development. To this end, the course will
courses an easy target for most students who wish to earn run in parallel with another similar course at Ohio State
credits without much effort. The result is a graduate who is University, Columbus. We propose to extend these courses
hardly able to estimate effort, make a realistic project plan or to include projects conducted jointly by students at IITB
drive development of a project of any complexity. Addressing and at OSU, and involving industries both in the Columbus
this deficit in academia cannot be done one step at a time - and Central Ohio and the Mumbai regions. Every project
rather we have to attack content AND methodology together undertaken by students will have a global development team
in a coherent offering that will produce ”‘real”’ software spread over these two universities and work together as a
engineers who can deal with development in today’s context. single entity to accomplish the project. The industry interaction
will primarily be with the local team even though we have
IV. T OWARD A R ELEVANT S OFTWARE E NGINEERING identified a source of funds for the teams to interact with each
C URRICULUM other remotely and in person.
In the spirit of lending academic coursework a practical
V. C ONCLUSIONS
twist, I will focus on two changes that must be made:
In this paper, I have presented the challenges in global
1) Change the traditional course into a lab in conjunction
software development and then identified the gaps in the
with the local industry. The focus here must be to expose
academic curriculum that should be addressed in order to
students to real software projects with real stakeholders.
train software engineers to be cognizant of current issues
2) Bring in the global perspective via collaborative software
in executing large, global software projects. We have also
engineering education involving multiple universities
outlined a practically oriented academic course that will stress
dispersed geographically across multiple time zones.
on the skills needed to actually execute global projects. Over
Needless to say, we need to incorporate our findings regarding multiple offerings of such a course we hope to abstract out the
globalization of software development into the theoeretical actual issues faced and present suitable solutions as learnings.
aspects of process and product as well.
At IIT Bombay, we are offering a semester long software R EFERENCES
engineering course for graduate students that aims to address [1] James D. Herbsleb and Deependra Moitra. Guest editors’ introduction:
these issues. In this course, teams of 4-5 students are mentored Global software development. IEEE Software, 18(2):16–20, 2001.
[2] Werner Kobitzsch, Dieter Rombach, and Raimund L. Feldmann. Out-
through an end-to-end experience with an industry-sponsored sourcing in india. IEEE Software, 18(2):78–86.
project and are expected to adapt and execute a software [3] Audris Mockus and David M. Weiss. Globalization by chunking: A
engineering methodology in their project. The major objective quantitative approach. IEEE Software, 18(2):30–37.
[4] Thomas A. Finholt James D. Herbsleb, Audris Mockus and Rebecca F.
of this course is to ready students for the marketplace by Grinter. An empirical stufy of global software development: Distance
requiring them to exercise the knowledge they have gained and speed. International Conference on Software Engineering, 00:81–90,
in previous software and software engineering courses on 2001.
[5] Jess Favela and Feniosky Pea-Mora. An experience in collaborative
industry-specified real world problems. Specifically, upon software engineering education. IEEE Software, 18(2):47–53.
completing this course, students are expected to have applied
their software engineering knowledge to aspects of:
• Software design driven by non-functional requirements
such as scalability, security, usability and performance,
generating and evaluating design alternatives and pattern-
based software design
• The process of developing software, such as configuration
management, project management, planning, team struc-
ture, roles and responsibilities, incremental and iterative,
workbook-centered, object-oriented, agile, lean software
development, project planning
• Presenting work to an audience of peers, and
• Business issues in software development
Proceedings of the 30th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC'06)
0-7695-2655-1/06 $20.00 © 2006
Authorized licensed use limited to: MEF Universitesi. Downloaded on January 05,2022 at 16:28:51 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.