Multidisciplinary education through software engineering

Software engineering is a multidisciplinary activity with professionals from many different backgrounds interacting together to build systems. For example, a software engineer may find him/herself interacting with technical writers, application specific specialists, database analysts, production engineers, and marketing professionals. One of the most important people to interact with the software engineer is the client who may not have very much technical expertise. It is critical, therefore, for software engineers to gain experience in interacting with people in other disciplines to facilitate communication. Although working with clients is more common, working with students in other disciplines is not as common for software engineering students. To foster multidisciplinary interaction, the Texas Tech Computer Science and English Departments are working together through a sophomore-level software engineering course. In this course, students are grouped into 12 to 17 person teams to work on a project for an external client. The students go through the entire software engineering process from requirements to implementation and place all documents and software on the World Wide Web. The English students review the documents of the computer science students and write the user´s manual for the system. A description of the outcome of the collaboration between the two departments and lessons learned are given.