Distributed software projects are becoming increasingly commonplace in industry. Yet, software engineering education rarely
graduates students with the necessary skills and hands-on experience that are particular to off-shore software development
projects. Three key areas in successful off-shore software development projects are well documented in the literature as communication,
knowledge management, as well as project and process management. This paper maps tasks within each of these three areas to
functions that have to be provided by remote collaboration platforms and tools that distributed projects rely on. A case-study
of an off-shore requirements engineering class experience between a Master course of Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico
and a customer in a Swiss financial institution shows a correlation between areas of learning by the students and functionalities
covered with the tools used in the classroom. The paper identifies additional tools, developed by the authors, which will
provide additional functionalities in the deficient areas to increase the learning and preparation of the students for off-shore
software development projects.
Keywords Offshore Software Development - Distributed and Global Software Development - Software Engineering Education - Development Tools - Collaborative Software Development - Requirements Engineering - Traceability