![](bg4.png)
• Agents perceive their environment and respond in
a timely fashion (reactivity).
• Agents can take the initiative and achieve their
own goals (Pro-activeness).
It is therefore possible to implement an EVE with dif-
ferent agents which have different types of behavior
and simulate people of different cultures, characters
or language, thus assisting software engineering and
students to develop the desirable skills work in elici-
tation groups in GSD.
5 CONCLUSIONS
GSD is a current trend. However, although this
paradigm has several advantages it also brings cer-
tain disadvantages which have been summarized in
this paper. In order to decrease the effect of some
of these problems we propose using different tech-
niques to train students and practitioners in working
with people who are geographically distributed and
who may have different cultures, languages and time
zones.
As future work we are going to develop of a sim-
ulator based on virtual agents which will allow stu-
dents to be trained in the process of elicitation require-
ments in the area of global development. The agents
will permit the simulation of stakeholders’ behaviour
by considering cultural, cognitive and geographic as-
pects, and also time differences.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is partially supported by the MELISA
project (PAC08-0142-3315), Junta de Comunidades
de Castilla-La Mancha, Consejer´ıa de Educaci´on
y Ciencia, in Spain; ESFINGE project (TIN2006-
15175-C05-05) Ministerio de Educaci´on y Cien-
cia (Direcci´on General de Investigaci´on)/Fondos Eu-
ropeos de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER) in Spain;
the CompetiSoft project (506AC0287, CYTED pro-
gram).
REFERENCES
Adya, M. P. (2006). Imparting global software development
experience via an it project management course: Crit-
ical success factors. In COMPSAC’06, pp. 51–52.
Aspray, W., Mayadas, F., and Vardi, M. (2006). Glob-
alization and Offshoring of Software. Association
for Computing Machinery (ACM), Job Migration
Task Force, March 2006. ACM 0001-0782/06/0200,
http://www.acm.org/globalizationreport.
Bhat, J. M., Gupta, M., and Murthy, S. N. (2006). Overcom-
ing requirements engineering challenges: Lessons
from offshore outsourcing. IEEE Software, 23(5):38–
44.
Damian, D., Hadwin, A., and Al-Ani, B. (2006). In-
structional design and assessment strategies for teach-
ing global software development: a framework. In
ICSE’06,pp. 685–690.
Damian, D. E. and Zowghi, D. (2002). The impact of
stakeholders’ geographical distribution on managing
requirements in a multi-site organization. In RE’02,
pp. 319–328.
Fuentes, R., G´omez-Sanz, J., and Pav´on, J. (2004). A Social
Framework for Multi-agent Systems Validation and
Verification. Wang, S. et al (Eds.) ER Workshop 2004,
Springer Verlag, LNCS, 3289:458–469.
Herbsleb, J. D. (2007). Global software engineering: The
future of socio-technical coordination. In FOSE’07 at
ICSE’07, pp. 188–198.
Herbsleb, J. D. and Moitra, D. (2001). Guest editors’ in-
troduction: Global software development. IEEE Soft-
ware, 18(2):16–20.
Huang, H. and Trauth, E. (2007). Cultural influences
and globally distributed information systems develop-
ment: experiences from chinese it professionals. In
SIGMIS-CPR ’07, pp. 36–45.
Lethbridge, T. (2000). What knowledge is important to a
software professional? IEEE Computer, 33(5):44–50.
Lok, B. (2006). Teaching communication skills with virtual
humans. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications,
26(3):10–13.
Ieronutti, L. and Chittaro L. (2007). Employing virtual hu-
mans for education and training in x3d/vrml worlds.
Computer & Education, 2007(49):93–109.
Nguyen, P., Babar, M., and Verner, J. (2006). Critical fac-
tors in establishing and maintaining trust in software
outsourcing relationships. In ICSE’06, pp. 624–627.
Raffo, D. and Setamanit, S. (2005). A simulation model for
global software development project. In The Interna-
tional Workshop on Software Process Simulation and
Modeling.
Richardson, I., Moore, S., Paulish, D., Casey, V., and Zage,
D. (2007). Globalizing software development in the
local classroom. In CSEET’07, pp. 64-71.
Sims, E. M. (2007). Reusable, lifelike virtual humans for
mentoring and role-playing. Computers & Education,
2007(49):75–92.
Wooldridge, M. and Ciancarini, P. (2000). Agent-Oriented
Software Engineering: The State of the Art. First Int.
Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering,
LNCS 1957:1–28.
Young, R. (2002). Recommended requirements gathering
practices. CROSSTALK The Journal of Defense Soft-
ware Engineering, 2002(April).
Young, R. (2006). Twelve requirements basics for project
success. CROSSTALK The Journal of Defense Soft-
ware Engineering, 2006(December).
ICEIS 2008 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems
396