Transitioning to Distributed Development in Students' Global Software Development Projects: The Role of Agile Methodologies and End-to-End Tooling

From 2005 to 2008, we explored different models of collaboration in student software development projects. In the past, project roles were distributed across students in the US, Cambodia, India and Thailand. What was common to our previous models was the co-location of developers, the client and quality assurance roles being the ones that were commonly distributed. A loose waterfall software development process was always used and activities were supported by a mashup of technologies. In 2009, we distributed the developers across the US, India and Senegal to form a truly distributed developer role. We also switched to the use of Agile methodologies with Scrum and to an end-to-end tooling solution, specifically the IBM Rational Team Concert environment. This paper describes the new model and reports on the evolution of our process and tooling infrastructure. In particular, it investigates how well Agile and Scrum practices supported our model and how important tooling is to their implementation. Initial guidelines for other educators are provided.