A distributed project for a globalized world

The Distributed and Outsourced Software Engineering course at ETH Zurich (DOSE) includes, as its key component, a distributed project in which student teams over several universities collaborate. Participation in the project, and the course as a whole, is open to any university with an interest in exploring the fascinating issues of distributed software development.

Distributed Software Development

Industrial software construction is, increasingly, a distributed activity. The scenario of a single team working in a single location for a set period, once the norm, is fast becoming the exception.

Distributed development, however, raises considerable problem. As everyone knows, software engineering is difficult; if it is hard to make a project succeed when everyone is in the same building, splitting the team across continents, time zones, languages and cultures does not help. Hence the many failures reported in outsourced and offshore projects.

Universities, in their software engineering education, should teach the principles and techniques that will avoid such failures, and more generally emphasize distributed development as a key component of modern software engineering, not likely to go away in any near future. The standard curriculum does not yet, however, cover it, in particular because it is difficult to organize project work that mimics the conditions of distributed projects.

ETH's DOSE course provides a controlled environment for such a project.

Join DOSE 2011!

If you are interested to join DOSE 2011, contact Bertrand Meyer and Martin Nordio. These are the requirements to join DOSE 2011:

• The DOSE project should be part of a course or lab (students have to get credit points for the participation)
• Students are at least in their 3rd year of CS studies (or equivalent)
• Students have a basic knowledge of Eiffel prior to course
• Project starts at Oct 5 and finishes on Dec 20
• Contact person (assistant of professor) able to respond in a timely manner (quickly)

Universities participating in DOSE 2011

Here is the partial list; more to be confirmed soon:

• ETH Zurich, Switzerland
• Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Vietnam
• ITMO, Russia
• IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Politecnico di Milano, Italy
• University of Rio Cuarto, Argentina
• State University of Nizhny Novgorod, Russia
• University of Debrecen, Hungary
• University of Zurich
• University of Delhi, India

Previous Courses

Since 2007, we have developed distributed projects in collaboration with several universities:

• ETH Zurich, Switzerland
• Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Vietnam
• Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Republic of Korea
• State University of Nizhny Novgorod, Russia
• Odessa Polytechnic National University, Ukraine
• Politecnico di Milano, Italy
• University of Delhi, India
• University of Debrecen, Hungary
• University of Rio Cuarto, Argentina
• University of Zurich
• Wuhan University, China

Publications

• Martin Nordio, H.-Christian Estler, Bertrand Meyer, Julian Tschannen, Carlo Ghezzi, and Elisabetta Di Nitto: How do Distribution and Time Zones affect Software Development? A Case Study on Communication. In proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE), IEEE, pages 176--184, 2011 [PDF] [BIB]

• Martin Nordio, Carlo Ghezzi, Bertrand Meyer, Elisabetta Di Nitto, Giordano Tamburrelli, Julian Tschannen, Nazareno Aguirre, Vidya Kulkarni: Teaching Software Engineering using Globally Distributed Projects: the DOSE course, In Collaborative Teaching of Globally Distributed Software Development - Community Building Workshop (CTGDSD), ACM, 2011. [pdf] [BIB]

• Martin Nordio, Mathai Joseph, Bertrand Meyer, and Andrey Terekhov: Software Engineering Approaches For Outsourced and Offshore Development (SEAFOOD), 4th International Conference, St. Petersburg, Russia, Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing 54, Springer-Verlag, 2010 . Springer-Online

• Martin Nordio, Roman Mitin and Bertrand Meyer: Advanced Hands-on Training for Distributed and Outsourced Software Engineering, in Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1, ACM. 2010. [PDF] [BIB]

• Kay Berkling, Mathai Joseph, Bertrand Meyer and Martin Nordio: Software Engineering Approaches For Outsourced and Offshore Development (SEAFOOD), revised papers, Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing 16, Springer-Verlag, May 2009 . Springer-Online

• Martin Nordio, Roman Mitin, Bertrand Meyer, Carlo Ghezzi, Elisabetta Di Nitto and Giordano Tamburelli: The Role of Contracts in Distributed Development, in Proceedings of Software Engineering Advances For Offshore and Outsourced Development, Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing 35, Springer-Verlag, 2009. [PDF] [BIB] Springer-Online

• Bertrand Meyer, Marco Piccioni: The Allure and Risks of a Deployable Software Engineering Project: Experiences with Both Local and Distributed Development, in Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Software Engineering & Training (CSEE&T), Charleston (South Carolina), 14-17 April 2008, ed. H. Saiedian, pages 3-16. [PDF]

• Bertrand Meyer: Offshore Development: The Unspoken Revolution in Software Engineering , in Computer (IEEE), January 2006, pages 124, 122-123. [PDF]

Contact

Martin Nordio — ETH Zurich
Bertrand Meyer — ETH Zurich
Christian Estler — ETH Zurich
Julian Tschannen — ETH Zurich