TRAINING GLOBAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT SKILLS
THROUGH A SIMULATED ENVIRONMENT
Miguel J. Monasor
University of Castilla-la Mancha, Campus Universitario s/n, 02071, Albacete, Spain
Aurora Vizcaíno, Mario Piattini
Alarcos Research Group, Institute of Information Technologies & Systems, Escuela Superior de Informática
University of Castilla-la Mancha, Paseo de la Universidad 4, 13071, Ciudad Real, Spain
Keywords: Global Software Development, Distributed Software Development, Engineering Education, Educational
Environment, Teaching Model, Simulators, Virtual Agents.
Abstract: Training and Education in Global Software Development (GSD) is a challenge that has recently emerged for
companies and universities, which entails tackling certain drawbacks caused by the distance, such as
communication problems, cultural and language differences or the inappropriate use of groupware tools. We
have carried out a Systematic Literature Review in relation to the teaching of GSD which has proved that
educators should provide learners with a wide set of realistic and practical experiences, since the skills
required are best learned by doing. However, this is difficult as companies are not willing to incorporate
students in their projects. In this paper we present an alternative: an environment that will simulate typical
GSD problems and will allow students and practitioners to develop skills by interacting with virtual agents
from different cultures, thus avoiding the risks of involving non-qualified people in real settings.
1 INTRODUCTION
Global Software Development (GSD) allows
development teams to be geographically distributed
whilst collaborating on the same projects with the
main objective of decreasing costs by finding zones
in which a skilled workforce is more readily
available (Herbsleb, 2007).
However, this shift entails a number of problems,
caused mainly by distance, and time and cultural
differences. The language barrier is one of the most
significant problems (Toyoda et al., 2009) since
communications usually use English as a lingua
franca, and the implication of non-native speakers
can entail the of use terms, expressions or gestures
that may be misinterpreted.
These problems affect the way in which the
stages of the software life cycle are carried out,
signifying that students and practitioners must be
trained in communication protocols, and must
develop new skills, such as:
- Thinking about problems from the perspective of
the other side (Toyoda et al., 2009).
- Communication protocols and the use of
computer-mediated communication.
- Oral and written communication with a
multidisciplinary team through a common
terminology and language (Toyoda et al., 2009).
- Codes of ethics, leadership and time
management.
Companies frequently complain that people who
have recently graduated lack the necessary
experience since they have rarely been involved in
distributed projects. It is therefore necessary to
provide learners with real experiences in order to
develop both the technical and non-technical skills
required in GSD (Swigger et al., 2009).
Instructors do not always have the appropriate
tools and methods with which to teach these skills.
In this poster we present a training environment
that will minimize the instructors’ effort, and will
allow learners to be placed in a simulated GSD
environment in which they will interact with Virtual
Agents (VAs) which can simulate different cultures
271
J. Monasor M., Vizcaíno A. and Piattini M. (2010).
TRAINING GLOBAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT SKILLS THROUGH A SIMULATED ENVIRONMENT.
In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Software and Data Technologies, pages 271-274
DOI: 10.5220/0002920402710274
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

at any time avoiding the need to coordinate with real
members.
2 RELATED WORK
The results of a Systematic Literature Review on the
field of GSD education has provided studies, such as
that of (Swigger et al., 2009), that present the joint
efforts made by universities from different countries
to involve students in the development of real
projects by using asynchronous tools to
communicate with each other. Most of these studies
attempt to simulate typical problems found in
industry.
We also found teaching environments such as
that of iBistro (Braun et al., 2002) which allow
informal communication problems to be addressed
by exposing students to GSD issues when
conducting informal meetings.
There are also blended learning environments
such as CURE (Schümmer et al., 2005), based on
the use of virtual rooms which may contain pages,
communication channels (such as chat, threaded
mailbox), and users. Users in the same room can
communicate by using synchronous communication
channels. (Toyoda et al., 2009) developed an e-
Learning training system oriented towards teaching
project management activities, along with an
application that helps in the teaching of methods
with which to solve problems.
We also found collaboration platforms such as
Jazz (Meneely and Williams, 2009), that train
students by using version control, chat, and work
item features.
Problems caused by using English as a lingua
franca and cultural differences are also addressed
(Favela and Peña-Mora, 2001) and direct contact
and interaction are seen as a positive experience to
achieve a better understanding and comprehension.
However, these proposals imply a high work
load for the instructors. Involving companies or
coordinating distant universities is not always
possible and requires a great deal of coordination. A
typical difficulty is that of managing to reproduce
the complexity of real environments, along with
cultural and language differences. Even in the best
of scenarios, we can always find schedule problems,
interaction problems and a lack of student
motivation, since they are rarely provided with
immediate feedbacks.
3 GSD SIMULATOR
Our proposal is based on the Scenario-Based
Learning (SBL) approach which immerses students
in a story in which they have to respond certain
questions in order to influence the outcome of that
story. SBL systems prompt the student to choose a
response between several options, and this choice
will influence the execution of the scenario. Our
simulator uses VAs, which by interacting with
learners will prompt them to textually response
questions and take certain actions into the system,
and these actions will determine the following steps
in the scenario according to a predefined scenario
workflow.
3.1 Virtual Agents
In our simulator, VAs behave like people from
different nationalities with different appearances,
cultures and gestures, in order to train learners to
confront cultural and language differences through
the use of textual dialogues.
The VAs communicate with students using text
and text-to-speech capabilities by using a chatbot
system, displaying emotions according to their
personalities and increasing the students’ motivation
by appearing to care about their actions.
Each scenario can contain one or more VAs that
will play any role in the GSD problem (e.g.
customer, requirements analyst, developer, project
manager, etc.). The scenario also has a Virtual
Colleague (VC) or team mate; a special VA that
helps learners to cope with the scenario by guiding
them, correcting their actions and explaining their
consequences.
3.2 Architecture
The system is based on a client-server architecture
and provide separated interfaces for instructors and
learners.
The instructors’ interface allows them to manage
learners, organize teams, assign tasks and examine
learners’ actions and send notices and emails to
individuals or groups. Our aim consists of
minimizing the instructors’ effort by automating
their tasks and providing a wide set of training
scenarios. This interface allows existing training
scenarios to be edited and new ones to be created,
along with defining new VAs with specific cultures
and personalities.
The learners’ interface provide a set of features
that allows communicate with instructors, organize
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their tasks and simulated meetings, access and
execute training scenarios, submit deliverables at
prescribed milestones, accessing documents and
answering tests.
The server side contains the GSD scenarios, with
the information required for their execution,
including cultural and language knowledge.
The cultural knowledge base is based on the
existing literature of Hall (Hall, 1976) and Hosfstede
(Hofstede and Hofstede, 2005) considering the use
of titles, presentations and greetings, starting and
finishing conversations, motivation and rewards,
requests, negotiations, conflicts resolution, etc.
The language knowledge base contains the rules
for all the language pairs that the VC will use to
correct learners’ mistakes, such as those that take
place when English is used as a lingua franca: the
incorrect use of “false friends”, incorrect plural
formations, avoidance of passive forms, the absence
of the third person, the use of redundant
prepositions, the overuse of certain verbs, etc.
3.3 Scenarios
A training scenario consists of a VC and one or
more VAs, a set of documents and tests associated to
the problem to solve and a Meeting Workflow that
will guide the interaction with the student.
When the learner starts a virtual meeting, the VC
will present him/her the scenario and the VAs
involved. Learners will take a proactive role in the
meeting and the VC will guide them and will detect
cultural problems and the inappropriate use of
language, so the learners will learn from their
mistakes and learn to solve them. The scenario
finalizes when the learner complete all the
documents associated to the scenario and fill in a
questionnaire that can be automatically or semi-
automatically evaluated according to a template.
A scenario is defined by a set of phases that
define a small part of the conversation. Each phase
has a concrete conversational knowledge and also a
context specific language and cultural knowledge
which are used in that context for that scenario.
These phases are arranged setting up the
Scenario Workflow. We also employ decision points
in which the student will influence the execution
path of the scenario based on their textual responses
or actions. The phases can also store information
about its priority, and this serves to evaluate the
learners’ actions and the correctness of their
decisions.
Using the scenario definition, the VAs and the
VC guide the virtual meeting following a logical
sequence according to the learners’ actions. This
design of the scenarios makes it possible to simulate
profound and insightful conversations, avoiding
speech repetitions and out of context interventions.
At the same time, this model helps to reduce the
loss of time on incorrect phases, prevents the learner
from returning to a previous conversation, removes
unnecessary complexity in the scenario design and
helps to structure the cultural and language problems
based on the context of the conversation.
The Meeting Workflow can be created and edited
from the instructors’ interface. For each phase, the
instructors can introduce the conversational
knowledge, documents associated and the cultural
and language knowledge.
Phases of the workflow can also be simple or
composed what means that can contain other
workflows with the aim of organizing the
conversation with a high granularity level.
4 TEACHING REQUIREMENTS
ELICITATION
We have focused our first scenario on the Global
Requirements Elicitation (GRE) stage, since it is a
highly communicative process, particularly affected
by poor communication, and cultural and time
differences.
In our proposed scenario, Spanish learners,
playing the role of analysts, will have to
communicate with a virtual customer from United
States using English in order to elicit a set of
functional and non-functional requirements and
develop a specification document of the software.
For this purpose, we have prepared our scenario’s
culture and language knowledge bases to include the
typical problems or mistakes for that cultures and
languages.
Figure 1 shows a part of a Meeting Workflow for
our design, in which the VC will guide the learner in
the context of the meeting and the Virtual Customer
will answer the questions according to the associated
conversational knowledge.
During the interview, the learner will determine
the next phase in the workflow by chatting to the
VAs. Since real GRE interviews usually require
more than one meeting, the scenario can also store
several meeting’s workflows dealing with the same
subject in a different phase of the project.
TRAINING GLOBAL SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT SKILLS THROUGH A SIMULATED ENVIRONMENT
273

Figure 2: Example of GRE meeting workflow.
After the meeting, learners will complete a
requirements document in which they will classify
all the requirements detected and which, will be
automatically evaluated to detect faults such as:
ambiguous, incorrect and unspecified requirements.
5 CONCLUSIONS
In this work we present a simulator for training
students and practitioners in GSD activities. The
usage of VAs implies that the training can be carried
out at any moment, thus avoiding the problems that
occur in real projects and reducing the training costs.
This simulator helps learners to develop the
informal communication skills needed in GSD by
putting theory into practice by playing different roles
in various scenarios. Although we have focused our
initial efforts on requirements elicitation meetings,
in our future work we shall consider studying other
stages of GSD (e.g. software design, software
construction, software testing, etc.) in which other
types of meetings might take place.
We plan to validate our environment in a course
on Software Engineering with students. Our aim in
the future is to gather a wide set of training scenarios
in order to obtain a complete and autonomous
training environment that will require minimum
effort and knowledge on the part of the instructor.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work has been funded by the PEGASO/MAGO
project (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
MICINN and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo
Regional FEDER, TIN2009-13718-C02-01). It is
also supported by the ENGLOBAS (PII2I09-0147-
8235) and MELISA (PAC08-0142-3315) projects,
Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha,
Consejería de Educación y Ciencia, in Spain, and
also by the FABRUM project (PPT-430000-2008-
063), Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, in Spain.
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