When OutSystems, the international software firm that offers IT departments unified solutions for web-based business applications, announced enhancements to its widely used development toolkit, the Agile Platform, last week, it credited many of the improvements to students in Carnegie Mellon University’s Masters Program in Human-Computer Interaction.
The work by a team of five second-year master’s-degree students was another increasingly common example of how the educational experience at CMU has become not only bi-coastal but also intercontinental. In this instance, the students worked with a company that has its U.S. headquarters in the Silicon Valley, where CMU also operates its West Coast campus. Yet for the assignment, their attention had an eastward focus as well–with collaboration between the HCI program at CMU’s main campus in Pittsburgh and the university’s campus in Lisbon, Portugal, where OutSystems also maintains one of two European facilities.
Their client challenged the students to improve the compatibility of the Agile Platform with the work habits and environment of IT developers, who rely on its complete set of tools for integrating, assembling, deploying, and managing business solutions on the Web, according to the students’ professor Anind K. Dey.
“They started by interviewing many clients of OutSystems, and used that feedback to identify the opportunities, propose innovations, and target improvements to existing functionality,” he says.
One issue was the IT developers’ management of workflows in a multi-tasking environment that requires users to rely on the platform for several projects. “That led to creation of a dashboard display of all projects,” Dey says. Other innovations? New tools for feedback among Agile teams and improvements to tools for debugging.
“The problems these students tackle are really varied,” Dey says, noting that such experiences are part of the program for all second year HCI Master’s Degree students, allowing a total of six teams–drawn from 38 students in Pittsburgh and 15 in Portugal–to cross boundaries that enable them to address the technical challenges of real world products while experiencing the excitement of collaborations in a global workplace.
Source: OutSystems, CMU HCI Institute, Anind K. Dey
Writer: Joseph Plummer
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