Distributed programming awareness among computer science students

Abstract

Software development trend has tried to establish Global Software Engineering (GSE) as well as Agile methodologies such as eXtreme programming. Due to their emphasis on face-to-face communication, Agile methods seemingly present a practical dilemma for distributed development for which communication is one of the greatest challenges. However, with their equal emphasis on frequent communication, transparency of progress and short iterations, they in fact provide an effective approach to address challenges in distributed collaboration, especially when augmented with GSE best practices. Introduction, implementing and adoption of distributed agile software development in classroom environments require additional technological support for the frequent synchronous interaction across sites and is far from trivial. In this report, a well-structured online questionnaire was designed to carry out survey among the volunteered students with about 200 participants, and the results were later analyzed. The study concluded that the level of awareness of the Global Software Engineering practices is very low among students of Computer Science as well as the use of tools that facilitate it.