Oral and written communication skills are crucial for effective software development. Software engineers interact with a diverse set of stakeholders: customers, end users, management, and coworkers, among other groups. Communication is complicated by the varying and competing goals of stakeholders, the lack of a common vocabulary, and the tendency of software developers to prefer the comforting precision of computers to the ambiguity and obscurity of human dialogue.
How can educators prepare students for the substantial communication challenges they will face in their careers? To develop an adequate response to this question, further conversation is needed to build bridges between industrial software developers and educators in technical communication and software engineering. This interchange will help to generate new pedagogical materials and curricula for software engineering students, informed by the communicative arts and grounded in the reality of industrial experience.
A Chautauqua meeting of these varied groups will help to start this conversation. The freeform and inclusive nature of the Chautauqua tradition will allow the diverse voices of multiple stakeholders to interact productively. The goal of the Chautauqua is to foster new alliances and projects focused on communication problems in software development.
