Assessing the Impact of the Distributed Software Development Course on the Careers of Young Software Engineers

Abstract

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.