Non-cognitive abilities of exceptional software engineers: a Delphi study

10/22/2019
by   Wouter Groeneveld, et al.
0

Important building blocks of software engineering concepts are without a doubt technical. During the last decade, research and practical interest for non-technicalities has grown, revealing the building blocks to be various skills and abilities beside pure technical knowledge. Multiple attempts to categorise these blocks have been made, but so far little international studies have been performed that identify skills by asking experts from both the industrial and academic world: which abilities are needed for a developer to excel in the software engineering industry? To answer this question, we performed a Delphi study, inviting 36 experts from 11 different countries world-wide, affiliated with 21 internationally renowned institutions. This study presents the 55 identified and ranked skills as classified in four major areas: communicative skills (empathy, actively listening, etc.), collaborative skills (sharing responsibility, learning from each other, etc.), problem solving skills (verifying assumptions, solution-oriented thinking, etc.), and personal skills (curiosity, being open to ideas, etc.), of which a comparison has been made between opinions of technical experts, business experts, and academics. We hope this work inspires educators and practitioners to adjust their training programs, mitigating the gap between the industry and the academic world.

READ FULL TEXT
research
10/22/2019

Software Engineering Education Beyond the Technical: A Systematic Literature Review

Higher education provides a solid theoretical and practical, but mostly ...
research
04/30/2023

Sustainability Competencies and Skills in Software Engineering: An Industry Perspective

Achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) demands adequate l...
research
01/04/2021

Exploring the Role of Creativity in Software Engineering

In order to solve today's complex problems in the world of software deve...
research
08/01/2021

Improving the performance of early-stage software startups: Design and creativity viewpoints

Over the last 20 years, a very large number of startups have been launch...
research
05/22/2018

Are Computer Science and Engineering Graduates Ready for the Software Industry? Experiences from an Industrial Student Training Program

It has been 50 years since the term software engineering was coined in 1...
research
06/11/2019

Innovating HR Using an Expert System for Recruiting IT Specialists -- ESRIT

One of the most rapidly evolving and dynamic business sector is the IT d...
research
02/05/2020

If I Hear You Correctly: Building and Evaluating Interview Chatbots with Active Listening Skills

Interview chatbots engage users in a text-based conversation to draw out...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset