Using Distributed Software Development in the improvement of communication and collaboration skills in SE courses: An observational study

Communication and collaboration skills are very important for Software Engineering practitioners. The practitioner who possesses these skills, as well as solid technical knowledge, will possibly perform his activities in a more efficient way. Generally, people acquire these skills through experience. However what can happen when we emphasize training this kind of skills during Software Engineering courses? Practitioners might get better prepared to the market expectations in lesser time, which could reduce training costs in the industry. In this paper we present an observational study aiming to allow a better understanding on how can communication and collaboration skills be improved by using Distributed Software Development (DSD). In the literature, we found previous researches that indicate a relationship between DSD and the improvement of skills. We use these researches as basis for our study. After a qualitative analysis of the data, we identified that, in the context of our experiment, the use of DSD in classroom accelerated the adoption of communication and collaboration practices and it can improve these skills.