Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
News
UNT Prof To Study Behavior of Student Software Teams
8/28/2007
The National Science Foundation has awarded a University of North Texas computer science professor a half-million dollar grant to study the performance and behaviors of student software development work groups, the university announced.The project, headed by UNT computer science professor Kathleen Swigger, will study how far-flung programmers work on large software projects at UNT and in Turkey, Panama and the United Kingdom.
"Outsourcing is not going to go away," Swigger told the university public affairs office. "There is a growing need to ensure that computer science students are taught the necessary skills to deal with this new type of programming. Students need to know how to use technology to work in culturally mixed and geographically distributed work teams, because distributed software development is becoming the norm."
The $499,252 project will also develop a curriculum to teach students the best ways to work in global software teams, including how to develop software when team members come from different cultures and work in different time zones.
"We'll be closely looking at the interaction between the teams, as well as how much is actually done," Swigger said. "People who are closer together typically interact more and perform better. The UNT team and the team in Panama have about the same time zone difference as the teams in Great Britain and Turkey, so we will be seeing what sort of interaction happens among the teams."
Swigger said Travelocity, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin, which do similar projects at their companies, will act as advisors on the project.
Read More:
Paul McCloskey is a contributing editor for the Campus Technology group of publications.
Cite this Site
copy text (above) for proper citation
Recommended Reading
- Fixed-Mobile Convergence: Dartmouth Beefs Up Cell Coverage, Cuts Costs
Problems with cell phone coverage aren't uncommon on college campuses. There are two main reasons: The beefy structure of historic buildings can block cellular reception within walls, and, on more remote campuses outside cities, signal coverage can be light.
- Thompson Rivers U Deploys Unified Digital Campus for ERP
Thompson Rivers University (TRU) in British Columbia has selected SunGard Higher Education's Banner Unified Digital Campus (UDC) to integrate its ERP systems.
- DV Kitchen Web Video Publishing System Released
DVcreators.net has released DV Kitchen, a new video encoding and publishing application for Mac OS X designed specifically for creating materials to be posted on the Web.
- NEC Debuts 4 Education Projectors
NEC this week debuted four new projectors targeted toward education applications, along with a new MultiSync LCD display. The new NP-series projectors are entry-level models started at $899 but are designed to provide high light output, support for closed captioning, and built-in networking capabilities.
- Security Researchers Uncover Spring Framework Vulnerability
Software frameworks are enjoying enormous popularity these days among a range of developers. It's popularity well earned; frameworks provide powerful tools for building more flexible and less error-prone applications. They generally enhance developer productivity with out-of-the-box functionality. And they can free developers to focus on features instead of common coding tasks.
- 3PAR Server Arrays Integrate Fat-to-Thin Processing
Utility storage provider 3PAR has announced the release of the 3PAR InServ T400 and T800 Storage Servers. The new hardware is built on the company's third-generation InSpire architecture, featuring the 3PAR Gen3 ASIC with integrated fat-to-thin processing.
