Abstract

Global software development (GSD) adds additional challenges to the traditional colocated development. Participants have to tackle new communicative and collaborative problems, since they interact with distant partners with different native languages and cultures and customs. Therefore, universities are recently considering the teaching of GSD and how to develop the students' skills needed in this field. Since developing these skills requires practice, and practicing in real environments is not always possible, our aim is to provide training in the communicative and collaborative skills required by means of simulation. In this work, we study the skills required and the proposals found in literature and we describe an architecture for developing simulations, which, by means of virtual agents, will induce users to confront the most classical problems in GSD. The advantage of this architecture is that it permits a rigorous and repeatable training in which users do not depend on the availability of other participants.