Communication is More than Verbal

Abstract

The software development process is a collaboration between developers, users experience experts, clients and other stakeholders. Several teams of Computer Science students developed citizen-science Android applications, working with scientists, the application clients and domain experts. We studied the applications’ development and determined the progress and performance of the teams by interviewing team members, studying their emails records, and documents shared by the scientists. The results from usability tests were used to measure the performance of the teams in terms of software correctness and usability. Our results showed that communication between clients and developers during the software development process is more complex than verbal. The quality of the documents shared by the clients is important.