PERCEIVED CHALLENGES OF USING UML BY STUDENTS IN MULTICULTURAL GLOBAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING TEAMS

Working in multicultural distributed teams to develop software demands a combination of high technical skills and soft skills. With an increasingly globalized work environment, these stills are necessary for future engineers. Implementing a graduatelevel university course – jointly taught at universities in two or more countries – poses several challenges, ranging from organizational and budgetary constraints to an increased effort from all involved instructors with different academic settings. One of the challenges – and the focus of this paper – is the use of UML within distributed teams as a communication and collaboration tool. A Global Software Engineering (GSE) Course was synchronously taught at three universities in Japan, Germany, and Indonesia. Students were surveyed before (ex-ante) and after (ex-post) the semester about their perceived ease of use and usefulness of UML, and collaboration benefit of UML. Challenges that students faced were collected after the completion of the projects. The results show disconnect between the perceived usefulness and intent to use UML, which is in accordance with previous research. Especially collaborative projects can benefit from UML usage. Germany with a low power-distance showed the least impact, international students in Japan the most.