Interdisciplinary Collaboration between Marketing and Software Engineering Students: Opportunities and Limitations

For a product to be successful, members from different functional units in an organization or even across organizations work relentlessly through phases such as market research, design & development, launch, marketing and evaluation. The invisible cardinal attribute required for this process is interoperable communication across teams. However, it is not uncommon for team members from different backgrounds to experience impediments to collaboration due to misunderstandings arising from differences in terminology or processes learned through their educational experiences which in turn impact the product development outcome. We present how a university’s software engineering and marketing capstone undergraduate classes collaborated to acquire cross-functional knowledge and experience through co-development of web and mobile applications. We detail the various milestones in developing an application and explain how the application evolved. The student teams developed alpha prototypes, which looked and functioned like the final products based on the students receiving feedback from potential users