HCC: Improving the Performance of Global Software Development Learning Teams

本研究旨在帮助学生在全球软件团队中更有效地工作。该项目将包括来自土耳其、巴拿马和英国的研究人员以及Travelocity和洛克希德公司的工业顾问，并将重点关注与教授计算机科学本科生如何使用计算机支持的协作工具共同开发大型软件应用程序相关的问题。研究人员将增强Web服务基础设施，以支持协作软件工具，并将其用于四所大学各自提供的高级编程课程。这些课程将使研究人员能够研究时间、地理和文化等“距离”因素如何影响分布在全球的学生学习者。然后，从学生互动中收集的数据将用于制定策略，以改善文化、空间和时间分散的学习团队之间的协作。这项研究的结果将是一个模型和技术，将重点放在与教学全球软件开发相关的问题上。这些问题包括教学生如何使用协作软件，如何成为一个文化多样化的工作团队的成员，如何管理时间，如何组织思想，以及如何相互交流。这个项目将研究如何使用技术来帮助学生学习如何克服时间、空间和文化的障碍。这项拟议的研究通过教导学生如何在文化混合的分散团队中工作，代表了一个重要的贡献。它还将通过确定哪些特定的个人、时空和文化因素是重要的，以及它们如何在计算机支持的协作环境中相互作用，为如何支持分布式学习团队提供实用知识。它还将测试具体问题是否可以通过直接或间接干预来补救，以及这些补救策略是否实际上提高了小组绩效。虽然这项研究将发生在编程课程的背景下，但其结果将对地理上分布的协作学习团队具有一般意义。它还应该通过让所有参与研究的学生接触来自不同文化和国籍的人来扩大他们的经历

This research proposes to help students work more effectively in global software teams. The project will involve researchers from Turkey, Panama, and England along with industrial advisors from Travelocity and Lockheed and will focus on issues related to teaching undergraduate computer science students how to use computer-supported collaborative tools to work together to develop large software applications. Researchers will enhance a Web service infrastructure that can support collaborative software tools and use it in advanced programming courses offered at each of the four Universities. The courses will allow researchers to examine how 'distance' factors such as time, geography and culture affect globally distributed student learners. Data gathered from student interactions will then be used to create strategies that will improve collaboration among the culturally, spatially, and temporally dispersed learning teams. The result of this research will be a model and technology that will focus on the problems related to teaching global software development. These problems include teaching students how to use collaborative software, be members of a culturally diverse work team, manage time, organize ideas, and chat (communicate) with one another. This project will examine ways to use technology to help students learn how to overcome barriers of time, space and culture. The proposed research represents an important contribution by teaching students how to work in culturally mixed dispersed teams. It will also contribute to practical knowledge about how to support distributed learning teams by determining which specific individual, spatial-temporal, and cultural factors are important and how they interact in the context of a computer supported collaborative environment. It will also test whether specific problems can be remediated through direct or indirect intervention, and whether these remediation strategies actually improve group performance. Although this study will occur in the context of a programming course, the results will have implications for geographically distributed collaborative learning teams in general. It should also have an effect on broadening the experiences of all students who participate in the study by exposing them to people from different cultures and nationalities