INVESTIGATING VIRTUAL TEAMS: PATTERNS OF COMMUNICATION AND COLLABORATION IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING LEARNING TEAMS

This paper discusses the investigation of communication and collaboration patterns in how virtual teams involved in Global Software Development (GSD). This work is part of the Joint Masters in Software Engineering (JMSE) Tempus project funded by the European Union (EU) involving six partner country institutions (three from Egypt and three from Palestine) and universities from UK, Greece, Italy and Germany. The scope of the project is to create a joint postgraduate degree in software engineering, delivered via blended learning across the two countries. The current trend in software outsourcing, remote software development and deployment of GSD teams led the consortium to investigate the integration of virtual teamwork in most of the courses in the programme. A critical aspect of the project was assessing e-learning, virtual team and GSD platform infrastructures available for supporting such work in a feasible and sustainable way. This led to a requirements elicitation amongst partners and industrial advisors in relation to the e-learning delivery mode, the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) functionalities required and the GSD mode to be used including virtual team structure as well as communication and collaboration processes to be deployed.