Interdisciplinary Team Collaboration between Software Engineers and Technical Communicators

Abstract

Software development is a creative process that involves stakeholders from various disciplines. This interdisciplinary collaboration can bring benefits and possible success to product design and development, but can also create many challenges for team collaboration. We studied the interdisciplinary collaboration in software development projects by students in Computer Science (CS) and Humanities (HU). Sixty-four undergraduate students from the two disciplines worked together to develop citizen science applications for smart phones. The process included requirement gathering, interface design, implementation and evaluation. We investigated their collaboration through surveys, interviews, identified issues and delineated causes for failures in the collaboration. The results of our study help to explain the interdisciplinary collaboration in software development and how to improve on it.