Investigating the Roles of Effective Communication Among Stakeholders in Collaborative Software Development Projects

Abstract

The development of software includes multiple stakeholders since it is a multidisciplinary collaboration. Processes in software development demonstrate many problems relating to multidisciplinary collaboration. Communication has been recognized as an important factor for success in software development projects because previous researches on stakeholder analysis and collaboration has demonstrated the importance of communication. Hence, this study investigated and analyzed communication between stakeholders in collaborative software development projects with references to team activities as a social and intellectual practice. The objective of the study was to define factors that would influence and recognize the process of collaboration during software development. The study focused on communication between the software developers (Students) and project managers (lecturers) during the software requirements phase, interdisciplinary collaboration, team process, and inter-team, particularly between software engineers and technical communicators. First, a survey questionnaire was developed to gather data and analyze the effects and sources of communication among the involved stakeholders in software development projects. An experimental analysis was also performed to further test the supporting impact of client documents on requirements gathering. An experimental study was conducted to further test the supporting effect on requirement gathering of client documents. The results revealed that project managers are vital to software development progress, because they are the one that will provide the team with documents that support requirements gathering, thus improving team productivity and efficiency. Finally, software teams ensured that participants from all professional backgrounds were actively involved in the projects with a relatively centralized team structure.