Developing teamwork and communication skills in a multidisciplinary experiment

The need of producing software engineers with strong teamwork and communication skills has been repeatedly stressed by industry worldwide. ABET includes these skills among the essential ones needed to be mastered by the students of an accredited program. Due to this great emphasis on teaming, communication skills and multidisciplinary work, academia had to respond by finding novel ways to introduce them to students. This paper reports upon a multidisciplinary experiment between software engineering and business management students. They collaborated to produce a software requirements specification for managerial processes involved in hiring and performance evaluation of employees within a firm. A description of the synchronization of the lectures with project deliverables in the two courses, different types of communication needed by students, positive interdependence of the teams across disciplines, and how they contributed to the success of the project will be discussed among other multidisciplinary issues encountered during this experiment.