Distributed Group Working in Software Engineering Education P. Brereton, S. Lees and M. Gumbley Department of Computer Science Keele University Keele Staffordshire ST5 5BG, UK Tel: +44 1782 583079 fax: +44 1782 713082 C. Boldyreff and S. Drummond Department of Computer Science University of Durham Durham DH1 3LE, UK P. Layzell, L. Macaulay and R. Young Department of Computation UMIST Sackville Street Manchester M60 1QD, UK Abstract Distributed group working of Software Engineering teams is increasingly evident in the ‘real world’. Tools to support such working are at present limited to general purpose groupware involving video, audio, chat, shared whiteboards and shared workspaces. Within software engineering education, group tasks have an established role in the curriculum. However, in general, groups are local to a particular university or institution and are composed of students who have a significant shared history (in terms of technical background and social interaction) and who are able to meet face-to- face on a regular basis. This paper reports on work undertaken by three UK Universities to provide students with the opportunity to experience group working across multiple sites using low-cost tools to support distributed co-operative working. Keywords: software engineering education, distributed group working, CSCW 1. Introduction Group projects have been widely adopted in many undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Software Engineering, Computer Science and Information Technology [1,2,3,4,5]. They play an important role in reinforcing theoretical concepts, in highlighting the issues associated with group working and in providing students with experience of the type of working found in industry. This theme of simulating a ‘real world’ setting has been a major motivation for group projects within higher education and has been identified as an important characteristic of successful group project ‘courses’ [6].