What makes it hard to design instructional software? Towards a collaborative platform for stakeholders of instructional software

People and communication between them is often ignored in software engineering even though they are crucial to the success or failure of a software project. During the life cycle of software, there is communication, cooperation and collaboration (C3) between a wide range of diversified stakeholders ranging from management team to maintenance team. We believe that the lack of emphasis on improving C3 is often the major cause for software failures. In this paper, we summarize four and half years of our experience of a analyzing a decade-long instructional software for adult literacy developed by 9 different teams spread across 9 different locations following 9 varied processes. We present the different kinds of stakeholders that we came across during this analysis and present the challenges of C3 in that context. We then present the initial facets of our solution from three major dimensions (i) designing a unifying modeling language for improving stakeholder C3 (ii) modeling information for multiple stakeholders using various modes of rendering at multiple levels of granularity (iii) harnessing the power of social networking to improve C3 among all stakeholders.