Paper Authors

Abstract

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract

Educating Future Software Professionals on Outsourced Software Development

Kevin A. Gary, Gerald C. Gannod, Harry Koehnemann, M.Brian Blake Division of Computing Studies / Computer Science Department Arizona State University East / Georgetown University Mesa, AZ 85212 / Washington, D.C. 20057 {kgary|hek|gannod}@asu.edu / mb7@georgetown.edu

1. Introduction

Software Development is undergoing a not-so-quiet outsourcing revolution. IT tasks, from documentation to customer support to testing, have moved offshore. Development was considered untouchable, in the realm of highly-skilled tasks that require development staffs to be trained and located near business stakeholders. Recent events have clearly shown that cost drivers exert the necessary pressures to invalidate this claim. The challenge then, is for software engineering programs in higher education to construct curricular models that achieve outcomes that include knowledge of, if not some measurable level of competency in, outsourced development best practices. We present a process-oriented undertaking between three campuses, Arizona State University East, Arizona State University Tempe, and Georgetown University, to experiment with learning objectives focused on outsourced development models.

Students in the Division of Computing Studies program at Arizona State University’s East campus enroll in a four-semester project sequence called the Software Enterprise that guides them through the full scope of software product development, from business modeling to deployment. Students in the Fall 2004 semester of the Software Enterprise performed Project Inception tasks that produced Software Requirements Specification (SRS) documents and analysis models. These deliverables drive the development of student projects at the three campuses. This provides a vehicle for comparative analysis of development processes based on whether students are co- located with students serving as business stakeholders (ASU East), are not co-located but within a geographic proximity to business stakeholders (ASU Tempe and ASU East), or are geographically separated from business stakeholders (Georgetown University and ASU East). This paper presents existing curricular structures at each campus, describes how these offerings are integrated to mimic outsourcing models, and discusses how these models will be assessed.

2. Software Engineering project offerings at participating institutions

The participants in this distributed, collaborative, outsourced project model are the Division of Computing Studies (DCST) at Arizona State University East (ASU East), the Department of Computer Science at Arizona State University Tempe (ASU Tempe), and the Department of Computer Science at Georgetown University. Each of these programs has a semester or multi- semester project course. In the case of ASU Tempe and Georgetown, existing offerings are Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education

• Citation

• Format
  • APA
  • APA - LaTeX bibitem
  • MLA
  • MLA - LaTeX bibitem
  • Bibtex
  • EndNote - RIS

Koehnemann, H., & Blake, B., & Gannod, G., & Gary, K. (2005, June), Educating Future Software Professionals On Outsourced Software Development Paper presented at 2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--15081