Distributed and Outsourced Software Engineering, HS 11

This course is held in collaboration with ETH Zurich under the title Distributed and Outsourced Software Engineering. The lectures and lab sessions will be given at ETH on Tuesdays 10-12 by Prof. Dr. Bertrand Meyer. For more detailed and up to date information see please refer to the official web page: Distributed and Outsourced Software Engineering (ETH).

A remarkable phenomenon is affecting the software development scene: the massive transfer of developments to countries such as India and Russia offering highly qualified manpower at rock-bottom salaries. The outsourcing business is already in the hundreds of billions of dollars, causes employment fears among Western programmers, and has consequences on just about every aspect of software development (including education). Offshoring also serves as a magnifier of most of the issues of software engineering, including for example requirements analysis and quality control.

This course explores the offshoring phenomenon from a technical software engineering perspective, providing a set of guidelines for making outsourced projects succeed, through both management approaches (in particular the CMMI) and technical solutions in areas of requirements, specification, design, documentation and quality control. The presentation is based on experience of outsourcing at ABB and other companies.

The participants will take part in a case study exploring techniques for making an offshored project succeed (or recover from problems).

This course provides students with a clear view of the offshore software development phenomenon, enabling them to participate successfully in projects outsourced partially or totally, and also helping them define their own career strategies in the context of outsourcing's continued growth.