Abstract:

The world today is a global world. This means that our students, the professionals of the future, should be able to cooperate and work together with people from other countries, with other languages and cultures. And that implies much more than being proficient in English or other foreign languages.

The development of these skills requires new initiatives and approaches that should be incorporated into the official curricula of higher education institutions.

In this paper we want to show one of these initiatives, carried out in collaboration with The Hague University of Applied Sciences (The Netherlands), within the scope of a curricular subject in the field of Software Engineering.

The proposal consists of developing a real software project in international teams, made up of two Spanish and four Dutch students. The project is part of official subjects at both universities, and is assesed at both, so that the commitment of all students is similar. In our case, it is part of the Software Engineering II subject, located in the sixth semester of the Degree in Computer Science and Engineering. Ten students (volunteers) out of the forty enrolled in the subject participated.

It was carried out from January to April 2019, following the agile methodology SCRUM, which identifies several well differentiated roles within the project and which involves daily and weekly meetings, and several partial deliveries of the project (sprints) until concluding with the final product.

The work plan included four phases:
- Week 1 - Teams building: the professors of both universities organized the students into teams. They started to get to know each other through some presentation videos that everyone recorded and shared with their colleagues.
- Week 2 - Project kick off. The Spanish students, accompanied by two teachers, traveled to The Hague, so that each team could work together, face-to-face, to define the product they wanted to develop, make the project plan and decide on the tools they were going to use to communicate and organize the work. This phase was crucial for the success of the projects, since it generated trust and commitment among the students from both countries.
- Weeks 3-19 - Development of the project collaboratively and online, using the different communication and collaborative work tools each team decided (whastapp, Skype, onedrive, etc.). Each team was advised by professors from both universities, in a weekly Skype meeting, which was also very important to avoid risks and problems in the development of the projects.
- Week 10 - Final presentation of the projects in front of an assessment committee in The Hague, made up of professors and professionals from a collaborating company.

The activity was really succesful: the students had a real work experience in a geographically distributed international team, and the results of the projects have been of great quality. All students have achieved high marks in this part of the subject.

Keywords:

International skills, Higher Education, Project based learning, SCRUM.