One of the main tasks of modern software engineering education is to enable students to appreciate the Fundamentals of Software Engineering: the methodologies, techniques and tools for software development, besides, the soft skills like management, communication and teamwork are very important for a cross-culture development team. This can be achieved by introducing a new CDIO-Based software project within the framework of practice-oriented cross-culture program. The program is carried out by students who consisting of the third-year undergraduate Chinese students and employees from Japanese companies make a software project based on teamwork in three months. Students are grouped into different teams, usually four members in one team, two Chinese student with less experiences and two Japanese staffs from the famous Japanese companies with two or three years working experiences.
The project is operated following the full lifecycle development of software engineering, in which the Japanese staffs from different companies act as management roles while the Chinese students play the role of technical roles. The students are supposed to finish the whole lifecycle software development with the methodologies, techniques and tools learned in class, meanwhile some team facilitation skills and evaluations are done at the end of each development phase. Results show that both the Japanese staffs and Chinese students gain rapid progress in the short time. They have positive influence each other due to the different cultural background and very good cooperation which guarantee the project to be completed punctually.
Proceedings of the 11th International CDIO Conference, Chengdu, China, June 8-11 2015