Fostering co-development between software engineers and technical writers

Industrial software development is highly collaborative and multidisciplinary. Technical writers have crucial expertise needed to kelp shape and change documentation, code, and interfaces created throughout the software development process; but often they lack the training and skills necessary to fully use the tools, methods, and processes of software engineering. If technical writers can be given training and access to these tools, methods, and processes, software development teams may be able to benefit from greater multidisciplinary collaboration between technical writers and software engineers and thus create better products. Based on our ongoing research into curricular design to encourage such collaboration, we first describe curricular designs we have tested, we offer preliminary recommendations for encouraging collaborative and multidisciplinary software development education, we describe our current curricular model for encouraging multidisciplinary collaboration in software development, and we conclude by pointing to the need for a model for collaborative software development