Prof. D. Petkovic CS department San Francisco State University

ABSTRACT In this paper we present assessment and comparison of local and global software (SW) engineering practices based on our software engineering (SE) class jointly taught for the last there years between San Francisco State University (SFSU) and the University of Applied Sciences, Fulda University, Germany. We define global SE practices as those used when the team members are for most part distributed in terms of location and time, and hence do not meet together in person. While global SE practices have become a significant mode of SW development, surprisingly little formal measurements and comparisons were done to understand it and compare it with traditional (local) SE practices. Moreover, the challenge remains as to how to effectively prepare students and employees for this environment. The key contribution of this paper is an attempt to objectively compare differences between local and global SW engineering practices using measurements from our SFSU/Fulda SW engineering class as a simulation of a real-world environment. As part of this work we also developed a practical SE teamwork assessment methods and SW tools based on java.net, which are useful in program accreditations. In analyzing the differences between local and global SE practices we measured and analyzed the following five main factors: quality of final delivery (including development of milestone documentation), progress impediment factors, expended effort, level of collaborative activity and teamwork problems. We will present our findings, and also the tools for teamwork assessment which we developed using java.net

BIO Dr. D. Petkovic obtained his Ph.D. at UC Irvine, in the area of biomedical image processing. He spent over 15 years at IBM Almaden Research Center as a scientist and in various management roles. His contributions ranged from use of computer vision for inspection, to multimedia databases and digital libraries. He is the founder of IBM's well-known QBIC (query by image content) project, which significantly influenced the content-based retrieval field. Dr. Petkovic received numerous IBM awards for his work and became an IEEE Fellow for leadership in the content-based retrieval area. Dr. Petkovic also managed and participated in several other projects while in IBM, among them User Ergonomics Research (involved in IBM's TrackPoint^? pointing device), and Foundations of Massively Parallel Computing. In the last few years, Dr. Petkovic had various technical management roles in Silicon Valley startups, the latest (VMware) involving virtual computing on Intel Platform. Some of the products Dr. Petkovic helped build won numerous awards and are widely used. He has also taught at Santa Clara University. Currently, Dr. Petkovic is the chair of the Department of Computer Science at San Francisco State University.

-- Main.ejrenaud - 28 Mar 2008