Mission

• To lead projects in global SW engineering that help us evaluate techniques and processes as well as provide students with practical training. These projects will be done in as realistic setting as possible to emulate real global SW development and SW engineering
• To focus our research and funding in this critical area. Research will be performed on tools, processes and architectures that support the global software development process. The issues addressed in our research include both the development of new tools, processes and architectures, as well as investigating the efficacy of these solutions in a realistic setting.
• To help graduate and undergraduate students obtain projects, internships and culminating experiences
• To focus our collaborative efforts with local industry and university partners around the globe. Our research collaborations include external partners drawn from the local computing industry in Silicon Valley where software development and globalization are prominent as well as external international university partners.

Overview of Projects

Currently, graduate students at SFSU and American University of Armenia are working on a project to develop modules for the Moodle open source course management system ( http://moodle.org/ ). Some of the modules being developed are:

• Creation of an audio conferencing module based on IP-telephony
• Online gradebook module
• Development of software and process to migrate courses from other course management systems to Moodle
• Development of file management software, including a WebDAV-based access interface into the file management tool
• Creation of a web-based, web presentation tool, which will allow the user to create a web presentation or modify an already existing presentation

In addition to the Moodle projects students at SFSU are enrolled in a graduate level Software Architecture course provided by a leader of the IT industry in Armenia. Students "meet" with the instructor on a weekly basis via communication technologies including voice over IP and video conferencing. In addition to providing SFSU students with this important advanced Software Engineering course, the SFSU students will gain valuable experiences in cultural issues and development efforts when the development teams are geographically dispersed

In another project, as part of our SW Engineering class we break students into small groups to simulate real SW development life cycle in small company setting. Students go through milestones such as requirements, specification, prototyping, beta launch and product launch, in parallel with the material that is being taught. In order to investigate and educate our students in issues related to emerging global SW Engineering, this year we are cooperating with Fulda University in Germany . Number of student groups from SW Engineering class collaborate with their counterparts at Fulda University and work together to build a SW project. In doing so, we achieve several goals:

• Students get excellent practical skills and education in global SW design and development
• We research and investigate what processes and communication tools and best practices are applicable to global SW engineering. This is performed by analysis as well as interviewing and surveying participating students

For more details read the following Technical Report: SFSU TR 06.02.

Director, Global Software Engineering Laboratory

Dr. Barry Levine levine@sfsu.edu 415-338-1661 Thornton Hall 949

Participating Professors

Dr. Dragutin Petkovic dpetkovic@cs.sfsu.edu 415-338-1008 Thornton Hall 906
Dr. Jozo Dujmovic jozo@cs.sfsu.edu 415-338-2207 Thornton Hall 946
Dr. Arno Puder arno@sfsu.edu 415-338-7688 Thornton Hall 909
Dr. Ed Lank lank@cs.sfsu.edu 415-338-7687 Thornton Hall 911