Multidisciplinary Systems Development: Challenges and Lessons Learned

Abstract

Systems developed by multidisciplinary teams should benefit from the varied backgrounds and diverse contributions of their developers. However, multidisciplinary systems development teams face challenges that can impair team effectiveness and limit the contributions of participating disciplines. These challenges may be major contributing factors to the long-term struggle of the cognitive and human factors engineering disciplines to contribute meaningfully to systems development. To gain insight into these challenges, we reviewed four of our own recent multidisciplinary systems development projects. In each project, cognitive engineers participated with systems and software engineers across the entire development effort. By describing challenges we faced, this paper is intended to draw attention to types of change that may facilitate the participation of multiple disciplines, and of cognitive and human factors engineering in particular, in future systems development efforts.

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