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Learning So Skills through Distributed Soware Development
Emily Laue Christensen
emic@itu.dk
IT University of Copenhagen
Copenhagen, Denmark
Maria Paasivaara
maria.paasivaara@lut.
LUT University
Lahti, Finland
ABSTRACT
The software industry needs universities to train developers to
have besides the technical skills, also strong soft skills to collab-
orate in globally distributed software development projects. To
develop these soft skills, we organized a distributed online software
development project course, during which student Scrum teams of
5–8 members from ve Belarusian universities worked in industrial
projects for Danish customers. The course aimed to 1) teach stu-
dents the Scrum framework and soft skills, such as teamwork and
communication with international customers; and 2) to give Be-
larusian teachers ideas for organizing similar courses in the future.
Based on 20 post-course semi-structured interviews with students
and stakeholders, and the analysis of 24 student learning diaries
we studied the learning outcomes and challenges related to soft
skills. The main reported learning outcomes were: communication,
methodical use of Scrum, problem solving, organizational/planning
skills, teamwork, interpersonal skills, and time management.
CCS CONCEPTS
•Social and professional topics
→
Software engineering edu-
cation;•Software and its engineering
→
Agile software devel-
opment;•Applied computing →Collaborative learning.
KEYWORDS
Scrum, software engineering education, soft skills, global software
engineering
ACM Reference Format:
Emily Laue Christensen and Maria Paasivaara. 2022. Learning Soft Skills
through Distributed Software Development. In Proceedings of the Interna-
tional Conference on Software and System Processes and International Con-
ference on Global Software Engineering (ICSSP’22), May 20–22, 2022, Pitts-
burgh, PA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 11 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/
3529320.3529331
1 INTRODUCTION
Universities aim at providing education that is aligned with in-
dustry needs to better prepare students for the workplace. Several
studies have found that novice software developers entering their
rst industry jobs lack some of the crucial skills. For example, Begel
and Simon [
6
] found that many of the problems the novice software
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https://doi.org/10.1145/3529320.3529331
developers faced at Microsoft were due to their lack of soft skills,
such as social and communication skills. More recently, Capretz
and Ahmed [
8
] argue that more emphasis should be put on de-
veloping soft skills in universities, as the importance of soft skills
in the creation of software is often overlooked by educators and
practitioners due to their technical background and expertise. Oguz
and Oguz [
20
] provide an overview of the gap between the soft-
ware industry and software engineering education, the causes of
which include the students lack of soft skills, e.g. teamwork and
interpersonal skills. Universities should follow the industry needs
for the graduates, and match the courses accordingly.
The Erasmus+ project MaCICT (2018-2021)
1
, aimed to modern-
ize the master curriculum of ICT studies in ve Belarus universities
with support from European Union universities from Germany,
Poland and Denmark. In addition, Belarus teachers participated
in didactic training courses, and jointly the European Union part-
ners and Belarus universities organized courses as examples of
the newest teaching methods that respond to the industry needs.
Belarus is an attractive outsourcing location for both European and
global software development companies, as the technical skills of
the developers are high, and the location is conveniently in Eastern
Europe, while the labour costs are signicantly lower than in the
Central European countries. However, the soft skills of the develop-
ers graduating from the Belarusian universities do not match to the
industry needs according to the surveys the universities conducted
in the software industry as part of the project. Especially soft skills
such as teamwork and collaboration with international customers,
as well as language skills, were noticed to be too low. The future
jobs of many of the Belarus software development students will
be in globally distributed projects, where they will be working for
international clients, using modern software development frame-
works, such as Scrum, and using English as their working language.
Therefore, we designed a globally distributed project course to
teach these skills. The aim for designing and running this course
was twofold: 1) to teach students from ve Belarusian universities
the Scrum framework and soft skills, and 2) to give Belarusian
university teachers experiences and ideas for organizing similar
courses.
In this paper, we rst report how we arranged a global software
engineering (GSE) project course for B.Sc and M.Sc level students
in ve Belarusian universities. This course diers from previously
reported GSE courses especially regarding the course set-up, which
is an outsourcing scenario: each student team consisted of members
from 2–3 universities located in dierent cities, but in the same
country, Belarus, while the industrial customers, the agile coaches
and the main teaching personnel were located in Denmark. Thus,
this set-up is similar to the outsourcing scenario that is typical in
1
Modernisation of Master Curriculum in ICT for Enhancing Student Employability
(MaCICT), for more information see the project web site: https://macict.eu
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ICSSP’22, May 20–22, 2022, Pisburgh, PA, USA Emily Laue Christensen and Maria Paasivaara
software companies in Belarus: developers located in Belarus and
the customer in another country. In other similar GSE courses (e.g.
[
11
] [
10
]) the students collaborating in the same teams are typically
located in two or three dierent countries, while the customer, that
in some cases is played by the teaching personnel, and in some by
real customers, is located in the same country as at least part of
the students. However, in our course we especially wanted to teach
students to work in an outsourcing scenario with real international
customers. In this way the course is similar to capstone project
courses [
13
], which have been increasing in popularity. It diers
from capstone project courses however, in that it is not placed at
the end of a study programme.
Second, we report our ndings on soft skills the students learned
based on the analysis of 24 student learning diaries, eight semi-
structured interviews with the students, and 12 semi-structured
interviews with the industry Product Owners, agile coaches, and
Belarus teachers. Moreover, we present our ndings on the soft
skills the students were particularly challenged with, as reported
by the stakeholders. Several studies focus on the complexities while
teaching globally distributed project courses, i.e. communication
and information sharing issues [
15
] and challenges in teamwork
and student motivation [
3
] and recommend various approaches
to handle these challenges. This study diers from the previously
reported studies on GSE courses as we analyzed the student learning
outcomes especially related to the soft skills they learned. In their
systematic literature review on GSE courses, Clear et al. [
9
] noticed
that previous studies have not put enough emphasis on the learn-
ing outcomes. We found only a few studies reporting GSE course
learning outcomes [
23
][
21
]. Therefore, by this study we contribute
to lling in this gap.
We also report our ndings on the practices that supported the
learning of soft skills. Finally, we report our ndings on the overall
course experience, key takeaways and challenges based on the ve
interviews with the Belarus teachers.
2 RELATED WORK
2.1 Industry Needs
It is often said that universities teaching computer science con-
centrate too much on “hard” skills, such as new programming
paradigms and development methodologies. However, the “soft”
skills related to human factors in software engineering are not
well supported by the courses. Therefore, students entering the
job market need to learn those missing skills [
6
]. Begel and Simon
[
6
] studied novice software developers at Microsoft. Their study
revealed that novice developers found themselves in situations that
diered from their university experience, e.g., working with a large
team and with a legacy code base. The authors found many social
and communication problems, which were mainly due to the anxi-
eties of working in a dierent kind of situation than they were used
to. Therefore, the authors recommend universities to arrange more
authentic learning situations where students would be working
with a large pre-existing codebase, and students would need to
interact with more experienced colleagues who challenge them.
Beecham et al. [
5
] surveyed three companies using GSE to identify
which GSE practices were problematic and important to the compa-
nies. They compared those to the practices GSE education literature
reported and found that GSE educators fell short in teaching project
management, and the interpersonal and leadership skills that are
required to manage complex coordination and collaboration in GSE
projects, i.e., soft skills.
2.2 Soft Skills
Soft skills can be interpreted in many dierent ways. In this study,
soft skills are dened as “the combination of the abilities, attitudes,
habits, and personality traits that allow people to perform better in
the workplace, complementing the technical skills required to do their
jobs and inuencing the way they behave and interact with others”
[
18
]. Matturro et al. [
18
] performed a systematic mapping study on
soft skills in software engineering and identied 30 main categories
of soft skills that are considered relevant to the practice of soft-
ware engineering. These included e.g., communication, teamwork,
analytical, organizational and interpersonal skills.
To shed light on the non-cognitive abilities, or soft skills needed
for developers to excel in the software industry, Groeneveld and
Jacobs [
14
] performed a Delphi study with world-wide industry
experts from 11 dierent countries. The skills identied and ranked
were classied into four main areas: communicative skills, collab-
orative skills, problem solving skills, and personal skills. Caeiro-
Rodríguez et al. [
7
] and Idrus [
16
] investigated the most relevant
soft skills for engineering and the students perception on their
importance. They found that the students highly valued soft skills
such as meta-cognitive skills (e.g. independent and autonomous
learning, willingness to learn, critical and analytical thinking), intra-
personal (e.g. initiative, self-discipline and planning) and problem
solving skills.
Several studies report how soft skills are taught in universities,
however, most studies do not analyze which skills students really
learn during those courses. E.g., Oguz and Oguz [
20
] interviewed
students and recent graduates to determine which skills were ac-
quired during their education and in course projects, and some
of the students reported that the university had provided them
with opportunities to develop and improve soft skills. However,
the particular skills learned were not specied. Richardson et al.
[
23
] performed a study of student learning experiences in global
software development projects. Here the students reported learning
about the importance of regular team communication and inter-
personal awareness, and team dynamics. Paasivaara et al. [
21
] also
studied student learning outcomes in GSE and found that students
learned how to communicate eectively and divide work eciently.
We found only one study that aimed to analyze the learning
outcomes regarding the soft skills specically. Sousa and Rocha
[
27
] presented game-based learning contexts for developing soft
skills in project management. The students were asked to reect
several questions in the course forum. The reections were analyzed
by the teachers and showed that the students developed skills such
as communication, planning, and prioritization [27].
2.3 Capstone Project Courses
Capstone project courses have become increasingly popular in
universities. Dugan [
13
] surveyed around 200 computer science
capstone project courses. According to the survey, the ten most of-
ten mentioned skills these courses aimed to teach were (by citation
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Refer to the paper using: https://doi.org/10.1145/3529320.3529331
Learning So Skills through Distributed Soware Development ICSSP’22, May 20–22, 2022, Pisburgh, PA, USA
frequency): design (24), requirements (22), groupwork (21), test-
ing (19), writing (17), speaking (15), software process (14), project
management (14), large system experience (14) and knowledge in-
tegration (10). Many of these are soft skills, such as groupwork,
writing, and speaking. Bastarrica et al. [
2
] studied student learning
in their capstone project course by asking students about their
learning, both in the early phases of the projects and in the end.
They found that the perceived relative value of soft skills grew
towards the end of the project, while the value of the technical
challenge dropped. They found that students felt that the relative
diculty of soft skills grows in comparison to that of the technical
challenge. Thus, they concluded that students seem to be well pre-
pared regarding technical skills in their previous courses, but not
so prepared regarding the soft skills. During the projects they both
learn those soft skills and realise the importance of the soft skills
to the success of the projects.
The course we present in this study is similar to a capstone
project course, as it is designed to prepare students for work in the
software industry through practical experience. This course was
not placed at the end of their study programme however, so it does
not serve as a culminating academic and intellectual experience for
the students.
2.4 Teaching Global Software Development
Literature has recognized many skills that are important to be
taught to students learning GSE, e.g., communication between
distributed team members [
23
][
21
], team dynamics [
23
], interper-
sonal skills [
5
] [
23
], and managing time [
28
]. All of these are soft
skills [
18
]. There are many ways to teach students GSE skills, e.g.,
emulating the workplace by organizing cross-university, multi-
site courses; engaging students contribute to open source projects,
which would give students real-world experience without the over-
head involved in cross-university courses; or using online simu-
lations and games that do not require as much calendar time as
the two other approaches [
4
]. However, while the cross-university,
multi-site courses might be the most demanding to organize, they
might be the most useful to the students, thus many papers have
reported this format to teach GSE. A systematic literature review
on GSE teaching [
19
] stresses that GSE teaching should be sup-
ported by practical experiences through which students can learn
by doing.
Many of the distributed project courses use Scrum, e.g. [
11
,
21
,
22
,
25
], as it is currently the most popular project framework in the
industry. Clear et al. [
9
] performed a systematic literature review
on GSE courses and found that a large number of universities have
already successfully developed courses teaching GSE, and have
developed ways to overcome the many challenges of teaching GSE.
They noticed however that the studies put less focus on learning
outcomes. This paper aims to contribute in lling the gap recog-
nised by Clear et al. [
9
] by studying the student learning outcomes.
Therefore, our main research question is: Which soft skills did the
students learn or improve?
3 THE DISTRIBUTED PROJECT COURSE
In this section we describe the globally distributed software project
course that we arranged during the fall 2020. The course was or-
ganized during the Covid-19 pandemic and therefore all activities
were undertaken purely online. We describe the learning goals of
the course, the stakeholders and their roles in the projects, the
teaching methods, and the software development process used.
3.1 Course Learning Goals
The main learning goals of the course were:
(1)
Getting hands-on experience of all phases of an industrial
software development project
(2)
Applying Scrum and other work methods and tools in a
project
(3)
Learning “soft skills” such as communication, teamwork,
and time management
(4) Learning global software engineering
(5) Applying new technologies
(6)
Understanding the common challenges involved in commer-
cial software development projects
The course learning goals were predened in the course descrip-
tion, and prior to starting the course, we asked from all enrolled
students their personal learning goals for the course, their technical
skills, ideal work hours and experience with Scrum. Before the
course all students had at least heard about Scrum, a few knew the
basics and four had used Scrum in their job. To our surprise, the
most often mentioned goal was strengthening the English skills, es-
pecially spoken English. Thus, even though English was not one of
the ocial learning goals of the course, it certainly was something
that students had the opportunity to learn, as all course events
were in English, and communication with the Product Owners
(PO), the agile coaches, the main teacher, and the teaching assistant
happened purely in English.
3.2 Student Groups
In September 2020, 33 students registered to the course, 3–9 stu-
dents per university, from ve universities. We created four groups
of 8–9 students. Each group consisted of 7–8 B.Sc. and M.Sc level stu-
dents and a student Scrum Master (SM). The students were enrolled
in various programmes, i.e. software development, programming,
computer science, and computers, systems and networks. Three
of the SMs were B.Sc students, and one was a M.Sc student. The
groups were formed by the teacher and the teaching assistant, so
that in each group there would be students from 2–3 universities
and preferably around the same number of students from each site.
This helped ensure that the groups were as balanced as possible.
While forming the groups we took into account the students pre-
ferred working times and their preferred fellow group members.
After the initial group formation, several students were permitted
to switch groups upon request. Nine students dropped out of the
course, for varying reasons, e.g. the unstable political situation in
Belarus and language problems. One student joined shortly after
the start.
The student groups carried out project planning sessions in the
rst week of the course. They were instructed to plan the allocation
of the budgeted eort per student in each sprint, schedule ideal work
days, decide on the main practices and tools for communication,
discuss teambuilding activities, prepare a group CV and create a
group agreement.
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ICSSP’22, May 20–22, 2022, Pisburgh, PA, USA Emily Laue Christensen and Maria Paasivaara
Figure 1: Scrum Teams
3.3 Clients and Topics
As customers we invited Danish companies, as the main university
organising the course was from Denmark and had collaborated
with the Danish companies on a similar course previously. We
received ve project proposals that the four student groups could
choose from. The chosen projects were to be useful for the company
proposing it and the project results were expected to be taken into
use in the company after the project. Each company had to provide
a PO, who would actively collaborate with the team weekly, and
participate, e.g., in the Sprint Planning meetings and Sprint Reviews.
Companies prepared project proposals before the course start up
and the student groups sent their group CVs to the companies they
were interested in working with. During the second online lecture
the POs gave short pitches on their projects, after which online
interviews between the student groups and POs took place. In the
end of this lecture session, both student groups and POs prioritised
their partner choices and we ran a matchmaking software based
on the stable marriage algorithm to match the projects and student
groups. The four nal teams of the course consisted of 5–8 students
and one PO supported by an agile coach (AC), see Figure 1.
The four project topics that the student groups chose were: 1) a
job centre dashboard for refugees in Denmark, that would allow
ecient integration of refugees in the Danish labour market; 2) a
prototype of a smart oce platform for a global company; 3) a SaaS
recruitment software, allowing for case based recruitment; and 4)
a web-based tool to help students make the right choices about
their studies and direct their studies towards their goals in life. The
companies providing topics ranged from a small start-up company
to a big global IT company.
3.4 Agile Coaches
Each team was assigned a professional agile coach from Denmark.
These coaches worked either as coaches or SMs in the industry.
All had previous experience in supporting student Scrum teams in
Denmark as agile coaches. In this course they coached their Scrum
team, and especially the SM, regarding Scrum and agile. In addition,
the coaches organised two Scrum training workshops. The coaches
were expected to use around 40 hours coaching their team and were
paid by the project.
3.5 Course Personnel
The main organizer of the course was a Danish university that
provided the main teacher and a teaching assistant, who had or-
ganized similar courses previously for the Danish students. They
Table 1: Course timeline
Phase Events Week
Group Planning Group formation and Scrum workshop I 1
Release Planning Project selection and DST Scrum simulation 2
Sprint 1 Scrum workshop II 3–4
Sprint 2 Course review I and experience exchange I 5–6
Sprint 3 7–8
Sprint 4 Course review II and experience exchange II 9–10
Sprint 5 11–12
Finishing Course review III and nal celebration 13
planned and organized this distributed, online course, based on
the previous Danish course. While each participating Belarusian
university provided at least one teacher, who selected the students,
supported students locally when needed, participated in the course
review meetings and nally, graded their students. Their main role
was supporting their students and getting ideas from the course for
their own teaching. Altogether six Belarusian university teachers
participated.
3.6 Teaching Methods
This is a project-based course with only a few lectures and other
events. The rst lecture consisted of an introduction to the course
and group formation. The project selection event took place in
the second lecture, and two Scrum training workshops were also
carried out during the course. The DST Scrum simulation, a playful
digital simulation created in the game Don’t Starve Together [
17
]
in combination with Trello [
1
], was carried out with each team,
as well as one session with three students who had not been able
to participate with their own teams and a SM who volunteered
to help. Two experience exchange sessions were facilitated by the
SMs, where the students exchanged experiences and advice across
teams. In the three course review meetings the students presented
their project progress to the course personnel, coaches and POs,
and received feedback. In the nal celebration event the students
presented their projects to all course participants. An overview of
the course timeline is presented in Table 1.
The written student deliveries consisted of three group submis-
sions: a process overview, technical overview, and the slides used
for review presentations. An individual learning diary was also
submitted by each student. The learning diary is an iterative report,
so the students submitted four times in total, and were graded on
the nal submission by the Belarus teachers. After the rst three
submissions, each student received individual feedback from the
teaching assistant in the form of an assessment rubric and person-
alised comments on their written work. In the following deliveries
the students were recommended to self-assess their work prior to
submission according to the rubric, and personal comments were
provided as feedback. The main tools for lectures and communica-
tion were Discord, Zoom, and email (see Table 2).
3.7 Software Development Process
All teams were required to use Scrum [
26
], and take into account
the requirements and recommendations in the course instructions.
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Learning So Skills through Distributed Soware Development ICSSP’22, May 20–22, 2022, Pisburgh, PA, USA
Table 2: Online tools for course lectures and communication
Discord
- The main communication and information distribution channel.
- Used by the course personnel, students, agile coaches, POs and other company
stakeholders.
- Used for the experience exchange sessions.
- Private text channels for each team, the SMs, course personnel and coaches, and
for the students.
- Open voice channels for each team.
Zoom
- Used for lectures, workshops, and the course review meetings.
Email
- Used in the beginning to inform all stakeholders.
- Used throughout the course to communicate with POs and Belarus teachers.
Other
- The teams used a variety of backlog management tools and instant messaging
applications, e.g., Trello, Jira, and Telegram.
If a particular course requirement t poorly into the project, the
team was permitted to propose changes. Each team was required to
have ve 2-week sprints that contained at most 36 hours of eort
per student. Prior to the rst sprint the teams carried out release
planning, which involved getting to know the team members and
the company, crafting a Product Vision and the initial Product
Backlog, selecting and studying technologies, and planning the
initial application of Scrum and other work methods and tools. In
the following sprints the student were expected to deliver software
increments.
Together with their PO, the students were required to create a
Product Vision that briey characterized the “why, what and for
whom” aspects of the project and a Product Backlog which con-
tained items that had a description, eort estimation, and were
ordered according to priority. They were required to have a Sprint
backlog for each Sprint that contained all identied tasks with a
name/description and an eort estimate. Backlogs were managed
in a dedicated online backlog management tool. The course also
required that each team create a burnup chart for logging the esti-
mates in the Product Backlog and tracking the work velocity. The
teams were required to arrange Sprint Planning, Reviews and Retro-
spectives for each Sprint. The course recommended having a Daily
Scrum meeting at least twice per week, as students typically spend
2 days per week on their project work.
4 METHODOLOGY
We wanted to understand learning outcomes and gather feedback
on the skills of the students from the stakeholders and pose the
following research question:
RQ: Which soft skills did the students learn or improve?
4.1 Data Collection
Our data consists of 24 student learning diaries and 20 semi-structured
interviews with course participants or stakeholders.
In their learning diaries students were asked to list their learning
goals for the whole project, a reection on the DST Scrum simu-
lation, learning goals for each sprint, the main points learned and
contributions in each sprint, and nal reections on the project.
The learning diaries varied in length from 1,400–4,600 words, av-
eraging 2,600 words each, with the SM students submitting the
longest diaries as per the course requirements. All students were
informed during the rst course lecture and reminded again at the
end of the course, that we would be analysing their learning diaries
as part of the data collection for this study to better understand
their learning, and that they had the opportunity to opt out without
explanation, but none requested this.
The interviews took place in late December 2020 and early Janu-
ary 2021. Each interview took 17–63 minutes and was 37 minutes
long on average. We asked students to volunteer for the interviews
after the course exams. All four student SMs, and four student
developers from three dierent teams volunteered. Moreover, all
four agile coaches, three of the POs, and ve Belarus teachers were
interviewed. All interviewees were informed of the purpose of the
interviews and the anonymity of the data collection, via either an
announcement in the course Discord or email, and they provided
written consent in their responses and again orally, just prior to the
start of the interview. 18 interviews were carried out by the teach-
ing assistant, who was in close communication with the course
participants, while two interviews (a PO and a teacher) were carried
out by the course teacher. All of the student interviews were carried
out by the teaching assistant, who was not involved in the grading.
The main themes in the interviews
2
were: participant back-
grounds, the most important learning outcomes, the most dicult
problems encountered in the project, the best experiences on the
course, the collaboration between students distributed in Belarus
and POs and coaches in Denmark, support from the teachers in
Belarus, ideas for improving the course further, and what partici-
pants would do dierently if they could start the course again. The
SM students were also asked about their participation in the SM
Community of Practice, and the Belarus teachers received questions
about student selection and grading. In addition, the teachers, POs
and coaches were asked about their motivation to participate in the
course, the students’ knowledge and learning, the suitability of the
project topics, and the collaboration with the organizing Danish
university. All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed by
the teaching assistant.
4.2 Data Analysis
The qualitative data from the student learning diaries and inter-
views were thematically analysed in NVivo by rst identifying and
coding all statements that described learning outcomes, and cre-
ating an initial set of codes which dened the identied themes.
The codes were then compared with a list of 30 soft skill categories
relevant to the practice of software engineering [18].
Ten of the thirty soft skill categories identied by Matturro
et al. [
18
] were not dened explicitly in their study, whereas for
some skill categories they provided several overlapping denitions.
Therefore, we rst created denitions for the categories missing a
denition, based on the soft skills grouped under those categories, as
identied by Matturro et al. [
18
]. Second, we compiled some of the
denitions provided by Matturro et al. [
18
] to minimise redundancy.
E.g., Matturro et al. provided four denitions for their category
communication, which were compiled into one brief denition. The
2Interview guides: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.gshare.17072117.v1
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Table 3: Soft skill codes and denitions in alphabetical order
Code Denition Reference [18]
Analytical skills
The ability to understand and explain each part of a whole. The ability to break a situation down into its component
parts, recognize what needs to be done and plan a suitable course of action in a step-by-step way. The ability to think
logically and analytically.
Compiled
Autonomy
The capacity to govern themselves by their own means. The ability to plan, carry out and complete work tasks
independently, under minimal supervision.
Compiled
Change management
The ability to adapt and work eectively with dierent situations and face of change. The ability to accept and adapt
to changes when carrying out tasks without showing resistance.
Compiled
Communication
The ability to communicate orally and written in a simple, concise, unambiguous, and easily understood way. The
ability to convey information eectively so that it is well received and understood.
Compiled
Critical thinking The ability to determine carefully and deliberately accepted, refutation or suspension of the trial about a particular
piece of information.
Verbatim
Customer orientation The ability to identify and meet the needs of its customers. Verbatim
Decision making The ability to judge alternatives and make appropriate and sensible decisions based on available information. Compiled
Initiative The ability to propose and/or take any action without the need for others to come to ask or say. Compiled
Interpersonal skills
The ability to behave in ways that increase the probability of achieving the desired outcomes. The ability to deal
with other people through social communication and interactions under favourable and inauspicious conditions.
Verbatim
Leadership The ability to lead and supervise others. Created from skills
Methodical
The ability to use a set of steps, neatly arranged, set by methods (techniques) to solve a particular issue or problem.
Verbatim
Motivation Motivation to work. Created from skills
Organizational/planning skills
The ability to assess, sort, prioritize and control the execution of tasks according to plan. The ability to eciently
manage various tasks without wasting resources. The ability to make people work eciently.
Compiled
Problem solving The ability to understand, articulate, and solve complex problems. Compiled
Stress management
The ability to withstand stress without losing control. The ability to work calmly and eciently, even under time
pressure or occupational stress.
Created from skills
Team management The ability to manage a team and maintain team cohesion. Created from skills
Teamwork
The ability of an individual who is good at working closely with other people. The ability to work eectively in a
team environment and contribute toward the desired goal. The ability to cooperate with other teammates during
teamwork.
Verbatim
Time management The ability to plan and schedule time realistically, and complete tasks accordingly in an organized manner. Created from skills
Willingness to learn
Eagerness and motivation to learn. Willingness and ability to become acquainted with novel subjects and areas in a
self-directed, active manner.
Created from skills
soft skill category list and the original denitions by Matturro et
al.[
18
] and our modied and shorted denitions can be found from
a web appendix3.
Next, the qualitative coding of student learning diaries and inter-
views was enhanced and partially re-coded using the 30 soft skill
categories by Matturro et al.[
18
] and the nal denitions which
were copied verbatim, created, or compiled by us. Particular at-
tention was paid to statements that may have been previously
overlooked due to the English skills of the students. E.g. none of
the students reported interpersonal skills specically as a learn-
ing outcome, but the analysis revealed multiple statements that
corresponded to the denition of that specic skill (Figure 2). All
coded passages from the student interviews were also cross-checked
against the same students’ coded learning diaries passages. If the
same learning was reported in both, it was only recorded as one
instance, while calculating which soft skills were mentioned by
each specic student. The learning outcomes from the initial set
of codes that were not categorized as soft skills, e.g., learning new
programming languages, were excluded from the analysis.
3
All 30 soft skill categories and their denitions can be found here:
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.gshare.18999875.v1
The stakeholder perceptions of the students’ soft skills were
explored through analysis of the interviews with the POs, agile
coaches, and Belarus teachers. Here statements that described both
learning outcomes and challenges related to the soft skill categories
were identied and coded. Out of the 30 soft skill categories listed by
Matturro et al.[
18
], 11 skills were not discussed by the students or
stakeholders as either learning outcomes or challenges in our data.
These skills were: conict management, commitment/responsibility,
exibility, ethics, results orientation, innovation, presentation skills,
creativity, negotiation skills, listening skills, and fast learner. The
nal set of 19 codes and denitions can be viewed in Table 3. The
results of this analysis were compiled in excel data sheets and
summarized in a graph (Figure 3).
All interviews and learning diaries were then analysed to explore
how these learning outcomes been achieved and two main practices
were identied as particularly important: 1) overcoming language
barriers, and 2) team building activities. Finally, the interviews
with the Belarus teachers were analysed again, to gain insight into
their experiences and key takeaways from the course, including the
challenges encountered. In addition, quotations from the learning
diaries and interviews were chosen to illustrate the main ndings.
The entire coding process was carried out by the rst author and
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Figure 2: Coded statement from interview
the identied themes in the statements were discussed and checked
by both authors, to ensure that we agreed on their t with the
codes.
5 RESULTS
In this section we present results to our research questions.
5.1 Learning Outcomes and Challenges
Here we present the 17 soft skills learned by the students, based on
the analysis of interviews with the stakeholders, and the analysis
of the student learning diaries and interviews. We also present the
soft skills the students were particularly challenged in, as reported
by the stakeholders. Several of the soft skills the students were
challenged in, were the same skills they learned. The last two soft
skills presented in this section, analytical thinking and change
management, were reported only as challenges, with no learning
outcomes in those areas. The results are presented in Figure 3 and
explained in the following sections.
Communication: 23/24 students and 8/12 stakeholders reported
that communication was a learning outcome of the course. The
students’ oral communication in particular improved greatly, as was
demonstrated through active participation in discussions during
meetings.
“During the formation of the sprint backlog and the prioritization and assessment of
the issue, we began to understand the sprint and how to communicate correctly with
each other and improved team communication.”
— Learning diary, student 1 (developer)
“I think they understood they do not need to be ashamed or afraid to speak out.. they
were just a bit too shy. But they opened up in the end and I think that was also a great
learning from them that they can take forward.” — Product Owner, team 1
Two of the student’s also reported that they had learned to ask
more clarifying questions, and three reported that their writing
skills had improved. In addition, learning how to communicate with
a PO from a real company was a key learning outcome that was
expressed by twenty students.
“..during these two sprints, we began to communicate more closely with the product
owner and realized how much it simplies the work. After we have been pointed out
the importance of the Denition of Done we began to seek the opinion of the Product
Owner more often, send mockups for design approval, ask questions of interest to
us..” — Learning diary, student 2 (developer)
Communication was also reported as one of the main challenges
in the collaboration with the students by 8/12 stakeholders. Here
oral communication specically was discussed as a challenge by six
stakeholders. While the students are quite good at written English,
and the assessment of the learning diaries placed most students at
good/excellent work, they initially struggled to express themselves
orally, especially in meetings with the agile coaches and POs. This
ties closely to language barriers which inuenced the communi-
cation, a point that was expressed by 9/12 stakeholders, and will
be discussed later in this paper, in relation to the students’ English
skills.
“The overall biggest challenge was denitely the language. It was really hard for
them to understand me and the PO, and it was almost impossible to get the team
speaking.” — Agile coach, team 1
Two stakeholders also reported specically that the students
were not initially asking them for help, while three stakeholders
reported that the students were not reaching out to ask questions. Fi-
nally, one stakeholder reported that the students struggled with con-
veying information about the political situation in Belarus, which
was aecting the project work.
Methodical: 20/24 students expressed that learning how to fol-
low and use the Scrum framework was one of the main topics
learned. While many of the student’s were initially unfamiliar with
Scrum roles and events, they quickly learned how the allocation of
roles and the steps outlined in the events contributed to eective
collaboration in the team.
“Understanding and organizing Scrum within the team, initially, it was quite dicult
and incomprehensible, with many new unfamiliar terms, words, actions. There was
no clear understanding of why this was needed, and how it could help in the product
development process. However, after quite clear and numerous activities carried
out by the project, this understanding began to appear. With each lesson, I became
more and more interested in this topic and began to understand the main aspects of
Scrum.” — Learning diary, student 3 (developer)
This was also expressed by 6/12 stakeholders who reported that
the students showed learning in their use of the Scrum framework.
“..it was still really great to see how they understood Scrum in the end and how
they used it as well. We could see in the burndown chart as well, it looked very
smooth. It was great, the last one at least. I think they really showed that now they
understand that they don’t just have to, by the end of the Sprint, go update stu
on the board. They actually have to use the board as a benet for them, during the
daily work..” — Agile coach, team 1
Regarding challenges learning Scrum, 4/12 stakeholders reported
that the students had struggled initially with learning the basics, i.e.
what the events were, what they needed to do during the events,
and why.
Problem solving: 15/24 students reported problem solving as
a soft skill learned during the course. In particular, the students
reported that participating in the Daily Scrums and Sprint Retro-
spectives, and actively communicating with the PO helped them
learn how to best solve problems they encountered in the develop-
ment work.
“During the rst sprint, our team faced diculties. For a more complete under-
standing of the project, it was necessary to obtain more complete information from
the Product Owner, obtain application layouts and other information about the
technical part of the project. This allowed me, as a Scrum Master, to gain the problem
solving skills of the development team through communication with the Product
Owner.” — Interview, student 4 (SM)
Organizational/Planning skills: 14/24 students reported that
learning how to best organise their work was a key learning out-
come. Specic skills mentioned by the students included task del-
egation and workload estimation. Organizational/Planning skills
were also reported as a learning outcome by 1/12 stakeholders.
“It is very important to set tasks that are not too dicult, otherwise they will take
too much time and are more dicult to understand, so it is worth breaking them
down into smaller tasks.” — Learning diary, student 5 (developer)
Teamwork: 14/24 students felt their skills in teamwork im-
proved throughout the course. Working on a distributed team
project was a new experience for most of the students, so they
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Figure 3: Learning outcomes and challenges
learned how to interact and cooperate through practice. This learn-
ing outcome was also reported by 3/12 stakeholders who noted
denite improvement in the teamwork during the project.
“It seems to me that the most important thing is teamwork. This is because, in the
current world, teamwork is everywhere and is highly valued. After all, one person
cannot surpass the work of several. Before this, I had never worked in a team and
the experience in this project will be invaluable.”
— Learning diary, student 5 (developer)
Teamwork was only reported as a challenge by one stakeholder
(1/12) who had expected that the students had more experience in
this area.
“..there was challenges with the teamwork. I thought they were more used to it. And
that was a very big barrier to break for them.” — Product Owner, team 1
Interpersonal skills: 12/24 students reported that their inter-
personal skills had improved during the course. Here the students
discussed how the projects provided an opportunity to build rela-
tionships and strengthen their personal and social skills. Although
some of the students were initially nervous about working with
team members who they were not well acquainted with, they over-
came this quickly, and several of the students established friend-
ships through the project work.
“I’ve learned and practiced a lot of social skills. There were some people in my team
that were feeling uncomfortable and I was trying to be an example how to stay cool
and not to feel angry or upset.. we had one incident when I with my teammate were
really angry with each other. We just needed several minutes to come back in reality
and apologized to each other.” — Interview, student 6 (developer)
Time management: 12/24 students and 2/12 stakeholders re-
ported learning time management as a main learning outcome.
Three students reported specically that creating team calendars
and coordinating team schedules was a new learning.
“It has always been a problem for me to plan my activities. I often overworked and
sat on tasks for more than the allotted time. During these sprints I’ve learned to
better track time.” — Interview, student 2 (developer)
Regarding challenges, coordinating schedules and conveying
information about meetings initially presented a problem for the
students according to 2/12 stakeholders. The students sometimes
forgot to invite the PO to the Scrum events and other teamwork
sessions, or tried to arrange work sessions with the PO on too short
notice.
Willingness to learn: 6/24 students reported willingness to
learn as a learning outcome. Willingness to learn from mistakes
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specically, e.g. forgetting to delegate or estimate tasks, was dis-
cussed by ve of these students. This was also reported as a learning
outcome by 2/12 stakeholders.
“By the end of the Sprint we understood that we made mistakes when did estimation
of tasks. We estimated all the sub-tasks but forgot about estimating the whole task..
But we learned from our mistake, so it won’t happen again.”
— Interview, student 7 (developer)
“They really had some great discussions in the three nal Sprints, especially the last
two ones. They were really reecting a lot, where in the rst two Sprints they didn’t
reect at all. When we had the rst retrospective they were just like: okay this is an
event we need to do because we’re told so. But they really understood: we’re actually
learning from our own mistakes and our own successes.” —
Agile coach, team 1
Customer orientation: 5/12 students and 2/12 stakeholders
reported customer orientation as a student learning outcome. The
students learned the importance of providing value to the customer
and how to best identify and meet their needs. Regarding challenges,
3/12 stakeholders discussed customer orientation as an area the
students struggled with. Here they mentioned specically that
the product could have been improved further if the students had
been more curious about the end users and delivering value to the
customer, earlier in the project.
Autonomy and Decision-making: 4/24 students reported that
they learned autonomy during the course, i.e. how to work inde-
pendently and self-organise, and 4/24 students reported that their
decision making skills had improved. Two of the coaches (2/12
stakeholders) reported challenges in autonomy, e.g. that they had
to tell the students exactly what to do during meetings. In addition,
one coach (1/12 stakeholder) reported that the students initially
struggled with making decisions.
Critical thinking: 2/24 students and one stakeholder (1/12)
reported that the students’ critical thinking skills had improved
during the course. The students learned how to think critically and
challenge the requirements put forward by the Product Owner.
“During these two sprints I realized that decisions made by the Product Owner might
not be the best or possible at all. For example, our Product Owner was encouraging us
to use webow for deployment of our project, and we were provided one development
account for it. But after looking into it we found a few problems with it..”
— Learning diary, student 8 (developer)
Two of the coaches (2/12 stakeholders) reported that the students
initially lacked the skills in this area.
Motivation: One student (1/24) expressed motivation to pursue
a career path as a programmer after participating in the course
project. This student was initially considering switching to a dif-
ferent study program, but was motivated to continue studying
software development through their participation in the course.
This was also reported by one stakeholder (1/12), namely the PO
from this students’ Scrum team.
“I’ve started to want to be a programmer again, thanks to this project, although I
had a lot of doubts about the career choice.. I nd it the best outcome of these several
months.” — Learning diary, student 9 (developer)
Leadership and Team management: One of the student de-
velopers (1/24) reported leadership skills as a learning outcome
and discussed their interest in becoming a Scrum Master. In addi-
tion, one student SM (1/24) reported team management skills as a
learning outcome.
Stress management: One student (1/24) reported stress man-
agement skills as a learning outcome.
“At rst when we had piles of work waiting for us, we were shocked. If we were
starting over again, we wouldn’t be so stunned.”
— Learning diary, student 10 (developer)
Initiative: Regarding initiative, only one coach (1/12 stakehold-
ers) reported that the students improved in this area during the
course, while all four coaches (4/12 stakeholders) reported that the
students did not take initiative to reach out to them for guidance
which proved to be a challenge.
Analytical thinking and Change management: Regarding
analytical thinking and change management, none of the students
or stakeholders reported learning in these skills. Two stakeholders
(2/12) expressed specically that it was a challenge to get the stu-
dents to understand the topic and the bigger picture of what they
were building. The students were very focused on small details, and
it was a struggle to get them to understand that they should focus
on what they were trying to accomplish during the current Sprint.
“..they (the students) had a tendency of wanting to complete one feature entirely
or go into some very very narrow or specic details which did not matter at all.
And then they had to get into this subject understanding that what they’re doing, it
doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be entirely complete, it just has to be
better than what’s in production already, and that was quite a struggle for them.”
— Agile coach, team 4
This ties closely to managing changing requirements, which also
presented a challenge for the students according to 2/12 stakehold-
ers.
5.2 Supporting Practices
The two practices that were discussed by the most students and
stakeholders as particularly important to support the learning of
soft skills are discussed next.
Overcoming language barriers: English is widely used in the
industry and prociency in the language boosts the condence of in-
dividuals and is instrumental in the development of soft skills, such
as communication [
24
] and presentation [
12
]. 15/24 students and
3/12 stakeholders expressed that the English skills of the students
had improved during the course.
“It was a good experience for learning and practising English. Every activity brings
some positive issues in English, from teambuilding, like “self presentation”, and joint
movie watching, to reviews, retrospectives, sprint plannings, the mock-up sending to
PO, and learning diary writing.” — Learning diary, student 9 (developer)
Teambuilding activities: Regarding the students’ interpersonal
skills and the friendships and relationships that were established,
teambuilding activities, both scheduled and spontaneous, were
reported as benecial. 7/24 students discussed the benets of team-
building activities and how these contributed to the teamwork and
to closer relationships within the teams.
“We have started to conduct teambuildings more often. We realised that they
strengthen our team spirit and we learn more about each other. In addition, these
activities help us to distract a little from routine work and do something else. During
teambuildings, we tell dierent stories, laugh together and do interesting surng on
the Internet. These are some of the best moments in our work.”
— Learning diary, student 3 (developer)
5.3 Belarus Teacher Experiences
All ve interviewed Belarus teachers stated that they were moti-
vated to assist with the course because they wanted to examine the
practices that European universities use to teach computer science
students, and to compare how these courses are organized with
how they are organised in their local regions and universities. A
key point here is the collaboration with real companies, and with
POs from other countries, which is not practised in universities
in Belarus. According to the teachers, computer science students
usually work on “toy projects”, where the teaching assistants act
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as the POs. One of the teachers was also very curious about the
potential output of the students, as they had previously experienced
that it was very dicult to achieve the goal of creating something
valuable within the given time-frame. The teachers discussed this
form of collaboration as a key takeaway from the course, along with
the course organisation, teaching methods, e.g., strict deadlines,
learning diaries for reection, and the tools used, e.g. Discord, Ka-
hoot, Mentimeter and DST Scrum simulation. The Belarus teachers
were also planning to try out organizing similar courses on their
own.
“I like the environment that you set up for this course and all of these channels for
teams, some channels with course materials and announcements. It looks simple,
nothing complicated to set up this environment. But it was done and it is actually
cool, because everyone has some common room to communicate, and it works very
well.” — Belarus teacher, team 3
One of the main challenges encountered in the course was the
fact that nine students dropped out after the initial group formation.
According to one of the teachers, this was a result of several factors
combined, e.g. the political situation in Belarus and military recruit-
ing. The technical infrastructure in Belarus also posed a challenge,
and presented issues in the form of poor internet connections and
a lack of hardware and software for programming and distributed
work in general, such as video cameras and microphones.
6 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
In this paper we presented how we organized a globally distributed
course in an online environment between Belarus and Denmark.
This course diered from previously reported GSE courses in sev-
eral aspects: 1) the course aimed to teach soft skills and study the
learning outcomes, 2) the course was organized in an outsourcing
set-up: customers, teacher, coaches from one country, students from
another but from dierent universities, 3) the course was taught
fully online utilizing dierent technologies (e.g. Discord) and tech-
niques (e.g. DST Scrum simulation). The main idea of the course
was to give Belarus university teachers an example of a course they
can run to teach their students, in particular, soft skills that are
needed in the industry. Figure 3 that summarizes the main learn-
ing outcomes as reported by the students shows that the course
succeeded well in teaching the skills we aimed to, especially the
soft skills. Among the learning outcomes, the students reported
communication, teamwork and problem solving as learned in the
course. Our denitions of these skills aligns with the soft skill areas
identied by Groeneveld and Jacobs [
14
], namely communicative,
collaborative, and problem solving skills, which they cite as three
of the skills needed for developers to excel in the software industry.
The students also improved their English skills which will con-
tribute to their future employability, as prociency in the English
language is often required in the industry [20].
The challenges the teams faced were mainly quite usual chal-
lenges students face in this kind of projects and from which students
learn. However, three of the challenges surprised us: many students
dropping out, the infrastructure challenges and how dicult espe-
cially spoken English was for many of the students. Finally, we were
positively surprised by two aspects: how well the course worked
in an online environment and how well students worked in dis-
tributed teams that had members from 2–3 universities. The online
environment of the course might have supported the latter fact, as
it made all students in the team more equal participants, when the
major part of all communication happened in the online platforms.
Limitations: We could not interview all students participating
in the course, as participating in an interview was voluntary. We
asked everyone to volunteer and eight students, i.e., one third of
the students, agreed. However, learning diaries of all students who
completed the course were analysed. Regarding teachers, coaches,
and POs, almost all agreed to be interviewed. Only one PO and one
teacher did not volunteer, thus our data covered the viewpoints of
these roles quite well. The teaching assistant carried out all inter-
views, except two, as we wanted a person that all knew well to do
the interviews, so that they would feel comfortable and answer the
questions as openly as possible. However, that could have aected
the answers, as the interviewees might have said slightly more
positive things to a person they knew well and who had been orga-
nizing the course, than if they had been interviewed by an outsider.
Finally, only one person performed each interview, which might
put some bias as to how the questions were asked, and especially
how further elaborations in semi-structured interviews were asked.
We aimed to mitigate this by planning the questions in detail jointly
in the research team (teacher and teaching assistant).
Future research: As the main learning goals of this course were
soft skills, we studied how students reported learning them both by
analysing their learning diaries and by interviewing them. In the
future, we encourage teachers to investigate the learning of soft
skills. Often students emphasize the learning of technical skills, and
might not even realize all soft skills that they learn or like. Bastarrica
et al. [
2
] had noticed students might not understand the value of
soft skills, nor how dicult they are to master. Thus, we suggest
emphasizing already in the beginning of the course the value and
eort to learn soft skills. The possession of soft skills is dicult to
objectively measure, which makes measuring the learning outcomes
challenging and grading courses that teach these skills dicult. In
this paper we presented one way of measuring the learning of soft
skills, by using learning diaries and analysing their content. Based
on this analysis we could measure more concretely which soft
skills students learned and how they learned them. We encourage
future studies to create more methods and ways to measure the
real learning outcomes of courses teaching soft skills.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank all the participants for making this study
possible, especially all the students, Product Owners, agile coaches
and the Belarus teachers. Finally, we are grateful to the reviewers
for their insightful comments and feedback, which has helped us
to improve the paper.
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