Distributed Software Development: Experience and Recommendation

This paper is based on a Distributed Software Development course project conducted over a period of four months (fall, 2012). The aim of the project was to develop a Classroom Face Recognition System(CFRS) to enable instructors automatically to record student attendance. This project was a collaborative effort between students and faculties from Iowa State University, United States of America; Jilin University, Republic of China and King Mongkut's University of Technology, Thailand. We make observations from a Project Management point of view of Distributed Software Development on the benefits and disadvantages of a variety of issues associated with distributed software development, such as of 24 hour work-cycle and expanded pool of workforce. We highlight the main constraints, assumptions, challenges and their corresponding mitigation strategies, and recommend improvements for future educational distributed projects.